


West - Love is a Kind of Bondage

by shaenie



Series: West [5]
Category: LoTR RPS - AU
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-02
Updated: 2010-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-12 09:10:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 40,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie





	1. Surgery: Cate, Dominic, Lando, Yuma, 1878

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=catedomlando.jpg)

  
The first two days of riding with the bullet still lodged in his thigh aren't really that terrible. The third day, Lando awakes from the scant three hours of sleep he had allowed himself, parched and aching, grainy eyed and foggy brained.

 _Infection_ , he thinks, the idea skittery and repugnant in his mind, and he feels a real thrill of fear. Which is funny, a little. He hadn't felt actual fear while they had been shooting at him. Not even when he'd been hit.

He thinks Cate is going to kill him herself if he keeps ending up laid up in her rooms, and the thought has the power to make him smile.

He reaches the outskirts of Yuma as the sun goes down, which is just the way he likes it.

Cate's house has a picket, but it also has a stable out back. It is small, and normally only the residence of a couple of horses.

He gets through town with only a few people the wiser, and those people do not recognize him. They don't know him, anyhow. He is grateful he'd traded his good, strong gelding for this placid, nondescript mare in... he can't think the name of the town. His head is pounding blackly, and there is a haziness to the edges of his vision that he doesn't not like, does not trust. He ignores it while he gets his horse into the little stable behind Cate's house, gets her half-comfortable at least. He'll have to come back in a few hours, rub her down, get her fed and watered properly, rather than just this curt attention.

But later. Later. After just a little sleep.

The climb to Cate's third story window is a challenge with his aching leg.

He manages it, somehow, and collapses on Cate's bed still in his boots and filthy coat. Cate is going to skin him if she comes upstairs and catches him at it, but he can't quite bring himself to care. He hurts, his head hurts, his eyes feel swollen and dry.

 _Infection_ , he thinks again, and instead of fear, the thought only makes him tired.

She's dead tired and her ribs are aching.  It's been a long night, and it's nowhere near to ending yet.  She takes a deep breath (deep as she can, anyway) at the landing, already looking forward to just sitting for a bit, just sitting still and not smiling for a few minutes, letting her face and her body and her mind be still.

She's grateful, really, that Liv can be depended on to keep things going for a while, and she's thinking absently of the things she needs to teach Liv to do, things that might let Cate take whole evenings off, as she opens the door and lets herself into her rooms.

She hears the breathing while she's still in the sitting room and carefully opens a drawer, pulling out a pistol. She doesn't know who the hell it is, but he's in for a rather unpleasant surprise if he thinks he can help himself to her room, never mind whatever else he thinks he can take.

Keeping her hand hidden in the folds of her skirt, she walks in and nearly drops the gun.

Lando is on her bed. Lando is pale, and sweating, and asleep fully dressed (though his clothes are unfamiliar, not Julien's fine things, but more like something Dom would  wear, working clothes) a sawed off shotgun at his side. On her bed. What on earth...

She goes to take the gun from him, but he wakes as her hand touches it and swings it towards her, and she holds carefully still.

"Your boots are on my bed."

The gun doesn't waver for several long moments, then he blinks (hunted animal fading from his eyes into tired recognition, something nearly resembling sense) and she can see him slowly come back from where he has gone in his sleep. "Sorry, love. Was too knackered to take them off."

He sets the gun aside as she moves towards his feet. The left boot is removed without incident, but when she goes to tug the right off, he curses, turning (somehow) paler and fresh sweat beads his brow. Her hands slide up his leg, pushing his coat out of the way, and she bites her lip to keep from gasping at the sight of the bandage (torn shirt) wrapped around his thigh. It's stained brown, old blood.

"Gun or knife?"

"Gun," he says, so quiet she can barely hear him.

"You get the bullet out?" She knows this is important. Leaving the bullet in will cripple him, if the infection (the signs were clear enough, how did she not notice them from the start?) doesn't kill him first.

"No time. No doctor."

"No. I didn't call him last time, but this time I will. You need to get the bullet out."  She's thinking of ways to get the doctor in without anyone noticing, in case whoever shot Lando thinks to look for him here.

"You can't. Won't do any good for me to be found, end up just as dead that way." He sounds certain and a chill goes down her spine. Hunted. He's being hunted.

Her hands are tied, really, he's right. She doesn't want to know what he did to get shot, what he'd done that he couldn't see a doctor and risk drawing attention to himself. She could guess, but it's better not to. Harboring a fugitive will send you to jail, at the least, and could get you hung, if the good citizens of the territory got to you before the law did. Her position is tenuous enough as it is (a balancing act between providing a valuable service men want and helping send them to hell, depending on who you ask) without knowingly helping a criminal. But she can't let him die, not after what he's done for her. "Well, _someone_ has to get it out."

"You gonna dig it out yourself?" He arches a brow at her, an echo of Julien, but then he's wracked by shudders. Shivers. Fever.

This is very bad.

She goes downstairs to find Dom.

It's slow, so Dom is at the piano, Liv sharing the bench with him, and he likes to tease her, pretend to get his fingers tangled and asks her, "Be a love, and lend me your hands, eh?" so she'll cover his fingers with hers and suddenly he can pick out simple little melodies that get almost-complicated fast; Liv laughs and shakes her head and he likes that she doesn't blush when he turns on the charm. Unless he's losing his touch. He smiles at her and she laughs again. Not likely.

"Shouldn't you be working?" Cate's voice is tight and brittle, giving him a start.

He snatches his hands away but Liv keeps a firm hold, smiling innocently up at Cate. "Slow night, lo- ma'am. Thought I'd get in some practice, keep my fingers nimble."

She's not smiling, and Dom stands slowly, giving Liv's hands a last squeeze.

Liv sighs dramatically. "Oh, don't mind her, Dom. She's just trying to wind you up."

There's a look there, Dom thinks, some look between the two of them. "No, I wasn't. Dom, the kitchen, now."

"Right," Dom says, nods to Liv and heads into the kitchen, and hopes whatever it is doesn't mean he has to leave, because he rather likes it here, finally.

Before she can follow him, she has to be sure Liv understands. She keeps looking at her, Liv with the smiling mouth (her eyes are dark with worry), and as she's searching for the words Liv asks, "What is it?"

"Can't tell you now, but if I ask you for something later…" Cate allows her voice to trail off. She thinks that some of her panic has leaked into her eyes, sees the worry send its roots deeper in Liv's eyes.

"Yes."

She nods at Liv (good girl, sharp as tacks that one) and slowly makes her way across the room. She stops to greet a few early customers because it is a normal night, there is nothing to rush over, certainly no man dying in her bed, and doesn't breathe until she is in the warm kitchen where Dom is industriously carving a roast.

She stands next to Cook (who may have a name, but refuses to give it, ever, and she really needs to stop allowing every law breaker in the territory live under her roof) and asks him, "Can you do without Dom tonight?"

"Yeah, should be able to. You gonna put him on the piano?" His hands never stop working as he speaks in the same low voice she'd used.

"No, need him to do something else." She walks over to him, tapping him on the shoulder.

"Sorry, ma'am. Really didn’t think it'd be a problem." He seems to be calm, expectant, really, and she hopes he can do what she needs, because if he breaks when faced with a half-crazed and armed Lando and passes out, what will she do?

"Don't worry about it. Follow me." She turns without looking, hears his steps behind her as she goes up the back steps. When they reach her room, she is careful to go first, standing in between the door and the bed.

"Told you to…" For the second time that night, she faces the wrong end of a gun. Lando pushes himself up, standing for a moment before his legs crumple from beneath him and he hits the floor hard, the barrel of the gun shuddering upward from the impact, then steadying, still pointed at them. "Who the hell is that?"

"Julien," she stresses the name carefully, hoping it'll bring some sense back to him, "this is Dom. He's been here a couple months, but he used to work the stages. He can help."

"Don' need help. Need to be left alone." Julien's accent, but a bit exaggerated, and the gun stays up. His face is absolutely grey, shining with sweat, and she notices for the first time that he's sporting a thin moustache and a sharp little goatee.

She turns, every instinct in her body screaming not to look away from the gun, and faces Dom, who is a bit paler, but still standing straight, meeting her eyes. Thank god. "Go downstairs and get whatever you need, but don’t say anything to anyone, for God's sake. He has a bullet in his leg and it needs to come out."

Their protests come at the same time.

"Dammit, Cate!"

"Shouldn't he see a doctor?"

"Julien, it needs to come out. Dom, no one else can know he's here. No one. Get your things." Dom leaves, quickly, backing away (smart boy, he doesn't want a gun at his back any more than she does), and it's almost a relief to face Lando again. She walks over to him slowly (like a skittish horse, don't want to spook it, but that isn't quite right, of course, there never was a horse as dangerous as Lando is right now). The gun is shaking very slightly, and his shirt is so soaked through with sweat that she can see through it as it clings to him. She kneels at his side, and says, "You know it has to come out, Lando. You know it."

"Leave it. Just leave it." But he doesn't fight her as she reaches out to point the gun away from her, and he lets her get an arm under him and help him to the bed, where he collapses again. "God."

"I leave it, you'll die. You think I'm going to let you die under my roof? Haven’t I told you that sort of thing is bad for business?" She tries to smile, but feels herself start to shake, like he is, and pushes the thought away, steadying herself as she sits next to him, reaching out to push damp curls away from his forehead.

"Might as well. Good as dead anyway. Die and go to hell, and never get away from his eyes." His head is rolling back on the pillow, but his hand is still on the gun, finger still on the trigger.

"Stop it. That's crazy talk. We'll get the bullet out, and you'll be fine. You hear me? You'll be fine." He will be. He can't die on her. She won't be able to live with herself otherwise. She can't tell the girls their (her) Julien has died in her bed and she stood by and let him.

"He killed Bill's eyes, Cate." He catches her wrist, holding on so tight his knuckles are white and she feels sparks of pain up burning up her arm. He reminds her of the crazy preacher who'd stood outside one of her old houses when she was first working, the one who said the end of the world was coming and they needed to repent before Christ returned or they'd burn forever. "He needed killing."

"I'm sure he did. I'm sure it's good that he's dead." Agreeing with the preacher had calmed him, sometimes, and he'd leave. "But you don't need to die, do you?"

"Bills wants me dead," he whispers and lets go of her wrist. His eyes are closed now, so she reaches for the gun, carefully pulling it from his fingers. He mumbles something else, but she can't make out anything other than "Bills" and "happy," and he finally goes still.

Movement at the door makes her look up, and it's Dom, with his hands and eyes full, and she doesn't know how much he's heard.

"Fever rantings," Dom says, catching and holding her eyes, swallowing the bile that had been rising in his throat since he started tearing his bedsheets into strips downstairs and shoved two throwing knives in his belt. It was always like this, he remembers, before any kind of surgery on the animals at the rodeo, and even before, years ago, although he's deliberately blocked most of that out, so it's just a memory of the anxiety that's now settled itself somewhere in his belly, turning into steady adrenaline in his arms and fingers.

And this one's like an animal, dark skin caked with dust, long limbs juttering against the bed, muttering half-coherently about death and things Dom would rather not hear, and that was what made working with the animals easier, wasn't it, you always knew how a horse got a bullet in its flank.

 _It's a trifle,_ Dom thinks, dragging his eyes away from Julien and nodding purposefully at Cate. "Right then," he says, "Need some whisky if you can." He drags a lovely solid oak chair to the side of the bed and takes the knives out of his belt, lays one on the side table. "And a basin of water."  There's no time to boil anything, he'll just have to make do with what's at hand.

Cate nods and eyes the knives, and then him, carefully, sizing all three of them up, before nodding again more decisively, turning away to fetch the basin.

The bandages wound around Julien's thigh, if you can call them that, are clotted with blood and grit, and he cuts them away as gently as he can, wincing as they stick to the wound and finally give, ripping away skin and trouser and clots of blood. Dom huffs out his breath through his nose, will never get used to the stench of infection, and prods the puckered, white edges; it oozes pus and more sluggish blood and he wipes at it carefully, carefully, his other hand framing the man's knee to keep it down in case he jerks.

But he doesn't.

He looks up the length of Julien's lax body to find those dark eyes fixed on him -- no, they're not, they're cloudy and far away, but Dom shivers, because he can't help feeling like Julien is looking straight through him. He squeezes his knee more for his own reassurance than for Julien's. "S'alright," he murmurs and Julien blinks slowly at him.

Lando doesn't know why, can't see why Bills is here, Bills is in Cate's rooms and he is looking/tugging/pulling at Lando's ( _Oh Christ Jesus Bloody Bastard CHRIST, it hurts hurts it hurts_ ) leg and is that a knife, does Bills have a knife?  Lando gropes, gropes, fingers stupid and nerveless, before catching his wrist and squeezing, twisting (like Bills had taught him once, _Press your thumb there, Lando, and they'll let go, they have to, there's a nerve..._ his warm fingers wrapped around Lando's fingers -- they had been rough, rough then from rope use, ranch chores, chapped hands and cracked palms -- showing him where and how hard) and the hand spasms open and the knife falls to the coverlet of Cate's (Cate's, he is at Cate's, why is Bills at Cate's?) bed.

Bills' eyes go wide and round, green green, his eyes are ... wait ... no grey, eyes are greynotgreen grey eyes, and they are wide and wounded and afraid.

He let's the wrist go, releases ( _Delerious, I'm delerious, and scaring this poor bloke -- a kid, he's just a kid -- near to death_ , he thinks) it and tries for a smile. "No, hey, I'm sorry, sorry. You ... I thought you were... " _... Bills, I thought you were Bills but you're not, you're just some pretty boy with grey eyes._ "Pretty boy," he says, and where is Cate? Why isn't Cate here?

But then she is, she slides her small, white hand into his and grips hard (Strong, she's strong, Cate, and when Lando dies, she'll be all right, and there is this boy now, boy-man, and he will help Cate) and murmurs something low and soothing that Lando cannot make out, or maybe they aren't worlds she's saying, just sounds.

"Cate," he says, and her hand tightens, grips his, and maybe she murmurs something like 'stay' or 'pray' he can't tell, but praying won't do any good, God is dead like the Federal Marshall, God is dead and... "I'm on the road to Hell, Cate," he tells her, and she just looks at him, blue eyes wide open (she has veils for her eyes, so many veils like harem dancers in stories, but she isn't wearing the veils now, she is not dancing) and shakes her head once, negation of something, Lando doesn't know what.

"The trousers have to come off," the grey-eyed boy says (he is looking at Cate, and not at Lando, and Lando thinks he is afraid to look at him, and feels a twisted, brutal flash of bitter, choking guilt, but he deserves it, yes, he does, he deserves that fear), and Cate tries to free her hand from his grasp, but he'll die on this bed right here before he lets her see him like this.

"Not like this," he hears himself, a grating gasp, and her eyes are wide, he sees her fear, and he tightens his grip.  "No. Don't -" _please_ doesn't quite make it out from between his lips, not here, not with this stranger in the room, but he sees her hear it anyhow, sees her understand it, and her hand in his tightens.

Her lips tighten and she nods, barely a movement, there and gone, but it is enough that he can smile at her a little until he feels the boy half-rise up over him, firm hands tugging at his belt.  He releases Cate's hand to catch both of the boy's wrists, stop him, and wide grey eyes meet his. "Don't you think you should at least offer me dinner first?" he manages, and when the boy only looks at him with wary bafflement, his voice drops low and deadly: "Slice them off of the leg, boy. If your hands get anywhere near my belt again, I'll cut your goddamned fingers off!"

He shoves hard, and the boy stumbles back, wide-eyed for one more moment, and then his expression hardens ( _not really a boy, not much younger than me_ , Lando thinks) and he steps forward again, and snatches the knife up from where it still lays on the coverlet.

"Be still," he says (Lando thinks Cate told him this boy-man's name, but he cannot think now what it was, the world is pulsing strangely and he is hot, and things surely aren't meant to be swimming like that in his vision, pulsing like a beating heart), voice calm and poised for all that there is sweat beading at his temples and on his upper lip.

"Lando," Cate whispers, directly in his ear, voice barely a sound at all, and he sighs, because she sounds broken, soft and broken voiced, and he doesn't want that.

"You'll have to tie me down," he whispers back, hoarse (and he really can't believe he is saying this, really he can't). "I'll kill him otherwise, my head's not too clear, Cate."

She stares at him, stares and stares, and then nods once, brief and practical. When she slides off the bed, stands, the world (bed) rocks to one side, streaking everything in his vision with redgoldgreenblack.

Dom watches quietly while Cate ties the man to the bed, and he narrows his eyes at the looks passing between them when she ties off the fabric at his right wrist. Dom cradles his own wrist against his belly, turning the knife over and over in his other hand. _Pretty boy_ , he thinks, as Julien murmurs nonsense to Cate, as though she's the one who's about to be helpless.

His mouth thins and he bites his tongue between his front teeth. Neither of them are pretty now, if he ever was, or harmless. Strapped to the bed and unarmed but never harmless. _Do well to remember that, Dominic_ , he thinks, and he hopes later he'll be able to throw it back at him, 'cos this bloke could be a pretty boy, except for the line around his mouth and the sharp edge in his eyes that Dom is sure is there all the time, fever or no.

"Haveta help me hold his leg down, yeah?" Dom says softly, watching Julien's eyes sink closed and twitch, waiting for the burn of the liquor.

Cate looks determined and she clamps down on Julien's calf while Dom quickly cuts through the leg of the denim trousers, peeling the thick, crusted material from the wound where it's stubbornly sticking, not that it can do much more damage. "Right then," Dom fumbles the bottle of whisky off the sidetable, holding one hand firm to Julien's knee, clamping the knife between his teeth. "On three," he says behind the handle, and, "one..."  He upends the bottle over the blown out flesh, and manages to flinch only a little at Julien's bitten off roar.

Dom does not look up at the desperate creak of straining wood, sets his jaw and says, "Quiet, mate," as he uses the edge of the knife to scrape away the last of the caked on mud and fabric, "Unless you want the whole town up here watching. And I'm not sure I'm the showman you want." His grin is more of a grimace and he can feel sweat beading on his upper lip and dripping down the back of his neck; they haven't even started yet.

He licks at his dry lips and looks at Cate for help.

She's been gone far too long, minutes dragging past like years, and she can't tell if it was a quarter an hour ago that she had climbed the stairs thinking to rest (hysterical laughter flutters in her chest that _this_ is what she gets as _rest_ ) or if it's been much longer, one hour, two. She feels cold sweat on her, dress clinging, and when she goes downstairs, if anyone comments on her absence, she will say she's feeling poorly and when she goes upstairs again, later, hours and decades later, it will be understandable. No one will fault her for it. But first, the bullet, and Dom's knives are shining brightly on the coverlet of her bed.

"He's right, Cate. Can't make noise. Can't be heard. Need something to bite on." She's not sure how he would bite something, his teeth would have to be pried apart, they're so tightly gritted.

"Shouldn't be awake for this at all. Can't be quiet enough, even with something to bite." Dom's voice is somehow surer now, eyes focused on Lando's leg (swollen, a streak like red lightning flying out from the wound as whitegray pus rains from it, and she can smell it, thick and heavy on the air, dirty and not clean like the air after a storm, Lando's death in the air, and her stomach stages a brief rebellion before she fights it down) and she knows Dom will hurt him.

She doesn't want to see Lando in pain, doesn't want him to feel anymore, she cannot watch him bleed through gritted teeth again. "I have laudanum."

He grits his teeth for long moments, and there's a vein, prominent at his temple, and a muscle in his jaw is jumping rhythmically.  Finally, he nods, and she can't help the dizzy spark of relief.  "I'll get it," she tells Dom, and circles the bed to grope for the bottle (not much left in it, she thinks she used most of it last time, but it'll be enough for this, it should be enough) among the jumble of things on top of her dressing table. The boy's hands are nervous and fluttery, the knife set aside, and Lando watches them twist together for several seconds, and then one of them pats at his bare knee, as though for comfort.  Lando wants to laugh, almost, at the gesture, but he doesn't, instead thinking that he can smell this boy, can smell him, and bizarrely he smells like roast beef and sour fear-sweat and soap.

"We'll need more," Cate says almost absently, and Lando sees that her knuckles are white around the brown glass of the bottle as she holds it out.  "This will do for now, but there's not much, and you'll be…"  She bites her lip and stops the stream of almost-babble (delivered in a cool, calm voice, but almost babble nonetheless, and there are two bright spots of hectic color on her cheeks, though she is otherwise very pale) before it can do any damage, but her eyes say it clearly enough.  _You'll talk. You'll dream and you'll talk._

 _It won't matter_ , Lando thinks fiercely, and it won't if he dies, but he might not die.  Even now, he might not.  Hasn't he been worse off before?  "In my coat," he whispers, "take my wallet, get what you need," and her eyes narrow as she looks at him, sharp and not quite furious, as though she can't bring herself to be angry with him right now.  "Don't argue, sunshine, we don't have time."

She probably would have argued (he actually smiles a little), because that's just how she is, but the boy is more practical, his hands already in Lando's coat, searching (and muttering quietly, cursing them both for fools, probably, and Lando smiles a little wider, though he feels like he's fading, moving further away from himself), and he can smell the boy again, something spicy and good under the fear, and he inhales deeply and actually feels a little steadier for it until the boy stiffens slightly, pulling his hand out of Lando's coat holding both Lando's wallet and something else, something hard and metallic with bright angles.

Lando knows well enough what it is, what both the boy and Cate are looking at -- the look the kid gives Cate is baffled, questioning, but Cate's face says nothing at all, bless her -- and his right hand tries to snatch it before remembering that his arms are useless, bound up above him. The world darkens, the room darkens, into deep grey, fuzzy and grainy like a shaft of sunlight through heavy clouds, mostly obscured but still visible.

"Put. It. Back," he says through teeth clamped tight together, jaw hard and clenching with tension. "Now."

The boy doesn't question him and doesn't look at Cate. Smart Lad.

Once it is out of sight, Lando's mind seems to unclench, unwind, and he pants as the shaking tension in every muscle in his body lets go. He feels weak, suddenly, and very, very ill.

Cate's face is very white, her jaw looks as tight as his own had felt, and he pities her, he is sorry for this ( _should have let myself die on the road, shouldn't have come back here, I'm sorry, Cate_ ), but it's too late now to do anything but go forward.

Dom's standing at her side now, badge (badge? Cate does not know what has happened that Lando has it, does not want to know, cannot know, will never ask) safely tucked back into Lando's pocket. His long fingers are wrapped around Lando's wallet (and she feels a bright surge of fury at Lando for being so _stupid_ and so stubborn-minded, as if she gives a damn about the _money_ ) and he pushes it into her hand; she takes it with numb fingers, barely aware of sliding it onto the table beside the bed. Dom's eyes meet hers briefly before sliding away.

He moves to the head of the bed, and maybe he's used laudanum before, Cate doesn't know, but he measures out several drops into a glass and then adds two fingers of water, swirling it around, and he certainly seems to know what he's doing. His hand slides into Lando's hair, supporting him while he drinks, and it's gentle, as if they are lovers and Dom is about to lean over to kiss him, only using his hand in Lando's hair to hold him still.

Lando grimaces but swallows it without complaint, and then Dom backs away from the bed, not looking at her, not looking at Lando, as though he's uncomfortable, or senses the oddness and intimacy of this moment as Cate sinks back to the edge of the bed, brushing Lando's damp hair back from his face.  Lando musters a smile, eyes fever bright as he says, "Night, sunshine," and his eyes close, face relaxing, peaceful.

They don't talk while they wait; it doesn't take long, probably less than a minute, before Lando's body goes lax on the bed.

Dominic presses his fingers to Julien's throat to find a pulse, faint, but solid and Dominic knows they made the right choice. If he wakes up, that is, but that's something they'll have to deal with after the bullet, after the infection and, God's grace, before whatever he was running from catches up with them.

Them?

 _Him._ Dominic frowns, smoothes back Julien's tangle of damp hair, and his fingers brush against Cate's. He draws his hand back and moves away deliberately, hoping uncoiled muscles will force his brain to relax, too, stop his heart from pounding so hard in his throat he feels like he's choking on it.

"Haveta." He clears his throat and Cate is looking at him almost blankly; she looks up slowly and her face doesn't change and he wonders if she's been here before, her skirts gathered up into her hands, holding them almost deliberately gently. "Hold his hand, if you want, while I work. Me," he clears his throat again and tries to gentle the hoarseness in his voice, "Me da used to say the animals could feel you there."

He shrugs out of his bend and balls it up, mopping up his already sweat-slick face, then tosses it to the floor. He slides the tip of first one knife then the other into the flame from the lantern that hangs above the bed, holds them there until they glow rusty orange, the tips just beginning to turn black with heat and carbon. He can feel her eyes on him, have you ever operated on a man, and Dominic breathes hard through his nose, his lips pressed tight together.

Julien's leg twitches involuntarily at the first touch of the chiv, nerve-endings flayed open and it's almost better now, working, the blood starting to ooze thickly, gash framed in the V of Dom's thumb and palm and it looks nothing like a man's flesh, just mangled meat and muscle. Jesus. He swallows hard to keep down his gut because it's not an animal, is it?

His nostrils flare at the sharp, sweet smell of blood and infection and he cuts in, quick but sure, trying not to go deeper than he has to. There's a rushing in his ears and his muscles are wound so tight he's afraid he'll burst at the seams, and he uses a new strip of bedding to wipe away the pump of blood, Jesus, Mary and Joseph don't let it have hit an artery, don't let _him_ hit an artery. His breath whistles in and out of his nose and he huffs more in, trying to breathe slow and deep.

A sort of detachment comes over him when he can't find the slug. He closes his eyes and uses the hand with the knife to wipe his face, and he feels the slick of blood in the crease of his nose and lip, the fold of his eye. Honor, the Chief would've said, and Dom grits his teeth, sinks the knife back in. The tips of his fingers are white from the pressure he's applying and he can't feel them anymore. For the best, yeah, and he rotates the blade, and now he's just digging for it, a little further, a little further, please, please, fuck's sake, let me find it.

Something slithers around the blade, and Dominic freezes, the sweat turning to icy slicks on his back and his breast and under his arms. He tilts the knife and feels resistance, stubborn bloody bastard slug, "C'mon," he whispers, "c'mon." He glances up at Julien's lax face, too deep in sleep to even dream, his eyelids don't twitch. "Almost," he rasps and levers a little more, feeling it give and start to slide.

"Cate," he says, and he forgets propriety and surroundings and all, "Heat the other chiv again."

She looks at him and half stands.

"The chiv, the knife, heat it up to scalding."

She does, her body hot next to his as she leans around him and he bites his tongue and levers again and there! The rounded, bashed in piece of lead eases itself out and sticks to the knife in all the gore. Dominic picks it off with a steady hand and drops it on the bedside table. He holds out his palm. "Knife. And bandages, quick as you can."

He uses the newly hot blade to cauterize the wound, pressing the flat of it over and over to Julien's skin and the smell of burning hair and too-hot flesh is almost a relief because it means it's over. He feels for his pulse again, this time in his wrist, and it's there, threadier than before but there all the same, and he's done his best.

Cate helps him bandage the leg, holding Julien's thigh up while Dominic pours another drought of whisky over it, then winds the bedding tight, not too tight, until blood stops seeping through. Their hands rest on one another's, on Julien's leg, and Dominic smiles wearily at her.

"Rest," she says, but Dom doesn't even hear her, just sees the shape of her mouth and he nods, the floor suddenly solid under his feet, the earth dragging at him, and he sits hard, his back against the foot of the bed, his head dangling between his knees.

He feels a hand between his shoulder blades, and he thinks for one moment it's his Mum. And even after he comes back to himself, he stays there, and lets Cate rub his back in long strokes, and he just breathes and thinks, _I'm alive, he's alive. He's alive._


	2. Post-Op: Dominic, Lando, Yuma, 1878

There's a sound that draws him towards consciousness, something both out of place and oddly familiar. Lando listens to it for a long time ( _thwip-slap, thwip, thwip, thwip, flick-slap_ ) before he figures out what it is.

Cards, the sound of playing cards sliding against one another, flick-slapping down, one on top of another. Inevitably, he thinks of Bills, but only for a moment. He knows where he is -- he can smell Cate, although it's fainter than he's used to, the good, clean smell of her nearly smothered by the burning smell of raw whisky and the shimmertang of blood in the air -- and he knows that Billy can't be here.

But Cate doesn't really play cards. He doesn't think she'd wile away the time with them while she sits at his bedside. So logic dictates it's the only other person who had been in the room. The boy, whose name Lando can't remember.

Not that it's surprising. His memory of the last day or so on the trail is patchy at best, and his memory of what had happened here, with Cate and the nameless boy, is stuttery and skewed, with soft edges and unnaturally jarring colors.

His leg is a dull throb of heat sitting low in his awareness. He isn't feeling much pain, but he's pretty sure that isn't because it doesn't hurt. He suspects there is only so much pain a body can take before it becomes background information, present but bearable. And it's not as bad as other times he's been laid up in Cate's bed, although he feels weaker, limbs leaden with exhaustion. The infection, maybe.  Or maybe the other times, he just hadn't be well enough to be conscious for this part of the healing process. He wants to open his eyes, but his eyelids are abominably heavy.

Something, probably some difference in the pattern of Lando's breathing, apparently attracts the boy's attention. Lando hears him stand and cross the room, booted footsteps muffled by Cate's rugs. The boy brushes Lando's hair off his forehead, and he feels the backs of the boy's fingers against his brow for a moment, then blunt fingertips against the side of his neck.

Lando wants to pull away -- his skin crawls a little at having a stranger's hand on his vulnerable throat, especially when he's so damned weak-- but he can't manage it. He does manage to force his eyes open, at least, and has the satisfaction of watching the boy (grey eyes, he remembers those eyes now that he sees them again) jerk back, startled.

The polite thing to do, the _Julien-like_ thing to do, would be introduce himself, but Lando's mouth is as dry as if he's been taking bites out of the desert, and he doesn't attempt it. He wonders how long he had been out. The shadows and the kerosene lamp say it's dark outside, but it can't be all that late, or Cate would be here, not this boy.

Man. Young man, he decides. Not a boy, even if he does sort of give off that feel. Maybe a little younger than Lando himself, but probably not by much, and his calm, even regard seems to indicate that he's older in his mind than in his body, which is how Lando feels most of the time.

"Dom," he remembers abruptly, and only realizes he's actually said it out loud because of the uncomfortably dry burn in his throat and the slight widening of the young man's (Dom's) eyes.

"S'right," Dominic says and pours a bit of tepid water into a foggy, squat glass. "Here. Fever's broke, but we best keep you in liquids 'till you're on your feet proper."

Dom is surprised the man remembers anything about the past two days, let alone information post-infection, pre-surgery. But Julien's eyes are almost-clear, not muddy brown but sharp and glossy like tumbled rocks, the ones that turn to glass when you hold them to the sun. They stare at each other, and Dom feels caught, drawn in, the air around them thick.

It seems he was right; this isn't the tiger-cub he thought Julien might be when he was weak and gnashing two nights ago. He's a mountain lion. Dom remembers seeing one once, far off, when the rodeo made camp at the base of the Rockies, the animal blending into the land, clay and dust and the shimmer of heat making it look like a ghost.

He remembers he didn't sleep the entire fortnight.

"Go on," he says gruffly, finally blinking first -- choice not lack of it -- rolling his neck to one side to crack it. "Drink."

Julien takes the glass and his fingers are hot and dry, but not with fever. With his blood running fast through him, and his hand trembles, so Dom sits slowly and keeps a hold of it under Julien's hand, his thigh tight against Julien's ribs, so he can feel him breathe through his whole body.

Julien reaches across with his other hand and tries to pry Dominic's fingers off and Dom frowns. "I've been doing for you for three days, a mite longer won't hurt you." He moves to press the glass to Julien's lips but he jerks back a little, his brow furrowing. Dominic sighs. "I'm telling you now, if you drink too fast and sick yourself or you spill and soak the last fresh bedclothes, you're on your own, mate."

It's the mix of exasperated disgust and amusement in Dom's voice that makes Lando give up and let Dom help him. The water is cool and perfect, but he only sips at it carefully, having no particular desire to "sick himself." Even at that, Dom pulls the glass away before Lando's had as much as he wants.

He lies back, watching through narrowed eyes as Dom sets the glass on the low table beside the bed. He hates the way he feels right now, and the fact that even the small exertion of sipping at a glass of water has his heart thumping madly in his chest. He can feel cold, oily sweat on his brow and the back of his neck. "Three days," he says, a half-question, and Dom looks at him, brow furrowed into a slight frown. "Where is Cate?"

He doesn't really mean it to sound as ungrateful as it does.

"Working," Dom says. He walks to the washstand, his shoulders straight and tight, and does something with his back to Lando. "She figures it's best if she goes about business as usual. There's no sense in drawing attention to the place."

Which is exactly right, of course. Cate's a smart girl; of course she'd know that. He closes his eyes and tries to remember some portion of the last few days.

He jumps, startled, at the feel of cool cloth on his forehead, eyes snapping open, and in spite of feeling weak and uncoordinated, he finds his hand wrapped around Dom's wrist.

"Just you settle yourself down," Dom says, and he looks sympathetic rather than annoyed. His eyes are dark grey pools, and Lando sees there are purplish circles beneath them. His face is solemn as he studies Lando. "You know Cate wouldn't leave you with me if I was any danger to you."

He sounds like he's pointing out the obvious for Lando's benefit, using the slow and patient voice one uses for small children and, apparently, invalids. Lando smiles slightly in spite of himself, and unwinds his fingers from Dom's wrist. Dom resumes wiping clammy sweat from Lando's face with quick, competent gestures.

Lando lets him -- there doesn't seem to be much else to do -- and watches his face, the slight furrow of his brow and the signs of exhaustion darkening the thin skin under his eyes. "Where did you come from?" he asks, which is a stupid question, of course -- Lando can hear the flavor of the southwest in his language, as well as the English -- but it seems like the right question anyhow.

"The land of hope and freedom," Dominic says, but Julien doesn't smile. Dominic knows he has a good poker face, not that he puts it to much use at actual poker, and he's even better at giving people the reaction they're looking for, especially when it's not true. But he knows, even ill, Julien's seen his face twitch, and they both know it wasn't on purpose. He clears his throat and turns back to the washbasin, running the rag through the water, watching it turn cloudy.

"Come from all over, actually. Most recently, I came from just downstairs where Cate's been letting me play barback until I get my feet under me." There's a moment of silence and Dom is able to smile when he turns back to Julien, brandishing the cloth. "Gonna mop you down again, mate, fair warning."

Julien rolls his eyes and even though he tenses, he let's Dominic lay the cloth on his brow. "My accent is really getting soft, I know," he says and he carefully gauges Julien's reaction; he's not the only one who's good at spreading the broads, because Julien just continues to look at him with a mixture of French arrogance and curiosity.

"Most times I just let it go," Dominic continues, like nothing is amiss, "the Yanks seem to have forgot where they came from."

"If I were an Englishman, I would do the same."

Dominic barks out a laugh, feels a surge of irrational, instinctive national pride. He wonders just how far Julien will take it, figures he'll just go along for the ride. He knows the value of privacy.

He lays the back of his hand on Julien's forehead; the skin is damp and warm, but there's no fever. His little finger lingers over the curve of Julien's eyebrow and he feels caught, and here's the real danger with this one, claws and teeth and that sharp mind aside.

He smiles and pats Julien on the head like his brother used to do to him when they were lads. "You're tainted goods now, you bastard." He holds up two fingers and winks. "Will they kick you out for surrendering yourself to the mercy of an Englishman?"

Lando snorts amusement, surprising himself slightly. "The country of my birth has little regard for me, I assure you, mon ami," he drawls, airy unconcern dripping from Julien's mellow syllables. "Although I will object to one aspect of your assertion; my mother and father were quite respectably wed at my birth, I assure you. But I've learned to take my friends where I can, no matter from whence they come."

Dom smiles, but the glitter of his eyes is still just a touch more knowing than Lando likes. Canny, this one, more worldly than his youth (the scruff on his chin is a meager disguise for it at best) would suggest. His language is the lowest class Lando has ever actually heard a real person employ. Most people, even those actually born to that class, take pains not to sound as though they were.

He wonders if Dom ( _Dominic?_ he wonders) is truly that comfortable with his origins, or if he's playing down his birth the same way Lando plays up Julien's mysterious origins. He's dressed simply enough for it, worn denims and a faded linen shirt, likely homespun, a smudged non-color from many washings, but Lando knows better than most that clothes aren't like feathers on a bird; a bird can be identified by it's plumage, and it lives its entire life within the confines its classification allows it.

Clothes can be changed. People cannot be reliably classified by such things.

"The land of hope and freedom is a living lie, Dominique," Lando says, deliberately using the French masculine, and he admits to being immensely satisfied at Dom's gruff, low laughter.

"Dom, begging your pardon," Dom says.

"Pardon granted, _Dom_ ," Lando says, and he's smiling at this boy, smiling and meaning it, and he guesses he shouldn't be surprised here, even now, because Yuma is the only place he ever really smiles. He should trust Cate more. She'd never bring someone here that Lando couldn't smile at. "Although you should not disparage Dominique, you know. It is a strong French name. It means Lord, in the masculine."

"A fine name, no doubt, Downy Beard," and Dominic has to physically restrain himself from actually touching the pads of his fingers to the dark, fine growth at Julien's temples and along the curve of his jaw.

Julien snorts, his smile turning wide and knowing, like he's just found a little piece of gold in his pan. Dominic figures he may as well even up the sides, give Julien a little more about himself since he knows a little more than Julien even knows. His smile makes Dom's belly feel warm and full and he wonders what Julien will sound like when he laughs. He decides, right then and there, to make it his personal mission to find out.

He hopes Julien will be around long enough to put it into action.

Dominic cracks his neck again and bows his back. "Cate needs to get more comfortable chairs in here if you make this a regular thing." Julien's face goes blank and Dominic forces his smile to remain just as bright, even though he feels a little stab of something up under his ribs. "More water?"

"Oui," Lando says. "S'il vous plait," he adds after a moment, because Julien has excellent manners, even when jarred, whether Lando himself does or not.

The corners of Dom's eyes sort of crinkle when he smiles -- "Please is shorter," he notes, and curls his long fingers around the glass to pass it to Lando -- and Lando thinks they look almost blue now, instead of grey, but then he turns away from the light and they're grey again, but paler than the swirls of dusk and charcoal they had been, like distant fog banks look when they're in shadow, dense and in motion. He's never seen such eyes.

He lets Dom support the glass from underneath without objection and barely notices when the hand that isn't curled around the glass itself curls around Dom's wrist, which is warmer than the room, and Lando can feel the movement of tendon beneath skin.

"That's enough," Dom says, fingertips curling up around the bottom of the glass to reclaim it, pull it back, but Lando's grip tightens around the glass (and the wrist), preventing its withdrawl.

"It's not enough," Lando says, "if I'm still thirsty."

"You haven't eaten anything in three days," Dom says, and there it is again, that slow, patient tone. "You'll make yourself sick."

Dom's eyes have gone dark again.

Lando lets go of Dom's wrist and the glass, deeply unsettled by the rapid shift of Dom's eyes, the quick leap from amused to serious, the facility with which he negotiates his expression, and he reminds Lando a little bit of...

"Do you play cards, Dom?" he asks, voice both soft and harsh -- he hadn't been lying, he is still thirsty -- and watches the quick tension in Dom's ropy forearms as he shifts and sets the glass back on the spindly-legged table beside the bed.

"Have done," Dominic says, settling carefully on the edge of the bed, his thigh pressed against Julien's ribs again. Julien doesn't move toward or away from him. "Not much better or worse than anyone else."

He watches Julien's eyes slide to the deck he had been shuffling and he shakes his head, letting a little grin tip his mouth. "I play a mean game of solitaire and an even better piano. Only thing that passes for entertainment around here."

He pushes his sleeves up his arms, into the crooks of his elbows, even though they haven't rolled down. "What about you? You don't look much like the gambling sort we usually get."

 _No, I guess I'm probably not much like the gambling sort you usually get_ , Lando thinks, distantly amused. He can feel the warm press of Dom's thigh against his ribs, and he can't help but wonder about it. Wonder about a man (boy) (man) that feels perfectly comfortable -- and Dom _is_ comfortable, Lando would bet on it, and he would win -- with his thigh pressed up against the body of another man.

In his experience -- and he has a lot of it -- that isn't exactly common.

His right hand hovers for a moment, raised from holding the glass, unable to return to its position at Lando's side because that position is currently occupied, and then he settles it across his belly, which leaves his bent elbow resting on Dom's knee.

Dom notices it. His eyes flicker slightly down, but don't actually stop on Lando's elbow, but it's the way they shift and lighten again that tells the story, not what he's looking at. Dom has a fairly good poker face, Lando is already certain of it, but he doesn't think Dom is a Hard Player.  How could he be, when the color of his eyes are his tell. In the end, Dom doesn't say anything, and his body stays relaxed and loose.

Lando feels a smile wanting to play across his lips. He lets it, because Julien smiles all the time, though he has to alter it, make it a little sharper and a little more mocking than it actually wants to be.

"No, I'd wager I'm not at all the gambling sort you usually get," he agrees, and he realizes he's said it for no other reason than to watch Dom's eyes shift and darken and churn with interest and intelligence, which they do. "Although," he adds (because he thinks having too much of this boy-man's attention might be slightly dangerous, not because _Dom_ is dangerous, per se, but because he is smart, too smart for his homespun shirt and his lower class accent and the tight, roped cords of his working-man's forearms, and he isn't in Yuma to draw attention to himself, especially not now, not like this, and he feels a little foolish for having to remind himself of it), "you haven't been here long, so who's to say it isn't only a matter of time before you meet a dozen more like me."

 _And save their lives_ , Lando thinks, but doesn't say.

There will be time for thanks later, when he has a clearer measure of Dom, something more solid than the memory of gentle hands and the shifting glimmer of his eyes.

If Dominic didn't know any better, he would say Julien was making a pass at him, with those tip-tilted dark eyes and the slow curl of his mouth, the left-over fever flush making his tanned face warm and ruddy. He does know better -- at least, that's what he tells himself -- but it doesn't stop him from wanting to get under Julien's skin a little, see what makes him tick, maybe save a little more than just his leg.

Dangerous ground, he knows, a tightrope he's tread so often it's becoming worn, so instead he lets himself grin and says, "If I were a gambling man, Jules, me lad, I'd say I could be here the rest of my life and I'm not sure I'd meet any others like you."

Julien's face is dark and lined and when he opens his mouth, Dominic cuts him off with a wink. "Only the bloody French would ride with a bullet in their leg and then threaten to cut off the arm of the man offering help. And I thank the lord that you may be the stupidest figurative bastard I'll ever have the pleasure of meeting."

The lowborn twang has virtually evaporated from Dom's speech, even the "me lad" sounding more like an affectation than a commonly used phrase. Also, he sounds more English than ever.

Lando blinks at him -- _did I threaten to cut off his arm? Oh, that's right, I did. Well. His fingers, anyhow_ \-- and has an abrupt and disorienting resurgence of memory, clear amidst the smeary sprawl of the rest of his delirious recollections, of wrapping his fingers around Dom's wrist and twisting hard enough to send the knife skittering across the coverlet of Cate's bed. The memory makes him wince internally, and the sight of faint, fingertip sized bruises on Dom's wrist, faded after three days he supposes, summon up a surge of guilt, which he feels altering his expression (and he really must be tired if he can't even hold on to Julien's smile).

"Je suis désolé, Dominic," he says. "I did not mean to hurt you."

"I know you didn't," and Dominic wishes he knew how to speak even a little French, because, offensive measure or not, Julien obviously feels more at ease with it right now. He palms Julien's elbow for a quick moment, firm but fleeting, just to reassure, and Julien doesn't even flinch. His eyelids are at half mast and Dom frowns, the quick flare of whatever it was in his belly squelched.

"You should rest," Dom says.

"I'm fine," Julien says stubbornly and Dom laughs.

"For me, then. Cate will have my head if I keep you up all night and you have a relapse." He wants to sit here next to Julien as he falls asleep, but the hard glitter of Julien's eyes behind his thin, dropping eyelids likely means he'll stay awake as long as he needs to while Dominic is so close. Out of distrust or simple hard-headedness, Dom's not quite sure which, and it's only through sheer will that he stops his mouth from stretching into a wide grin.

He stands slowly, keeping both hands out where Julien can see them. "I'll be close if you need me."

Lando is certain that Dominic means this to be reassuring, and it is, at least somewhat. It also makes him feel oddly restless, though, as if there is something else or something more, but Dominic is right. He is tired, maybe too tired to figure out exactly what it is about Dom being close that unsettles him slightly.

He watches Dom back away three steps and then turn his back, and it occurs to him that it's very much deliberate. He can see it in the line of Dom's spine and the tension between his shoulder blades. It's the body language of a man that knows he's turning his back on someone or something that it might not be entirely safe to have one's back to.

Lando supposes he's earned that wariness.

And it's for the best, anyhow, at least while he's laid up in Cate's bed, at least while he's mostly helpless and so tired it feels like his eyelids are weighted. His face itches a little, and he guesses he needs a shave -- Julien doesn't wear a beard -- and he's uncomfortably aware that the addition or subtraction of a little facial hair makes a big difference in his identity; he's willing to bet he looks a little bit too much like a wanted man right now.

He thinks about asking for a shave, but as much as he likes Dom already, he doesn't think he likes him quite that much. He'll ask Cate, later.

And maybe, in the coming days and weeks, when his strength has returned and he's safe (safer, anyhow), he can use some of Julien's easy charm to banish that wariness. If he chooses to, anyway. If he takes Dom's measure with a clear head and feels it's safe to do so.

He manages to keep his eyes open until Dom returns to his solitaire game (his long fingers nimble as he handles the cards, wrists quick and flexible, movements dexterous, and Lando thinks Dom is better at cards than he lets on), and then they drift closed all on their own.

He wants to think -- he has a lot to think about, after all -- but it's only moments after he finally lets his eyes close that he feels soft eddies of sleep curling tendrils into his awareness. He lets it go, and falls asleep to the same sounds he'd awakened to, complete with the twinge of pain and the warm comfort that those sounds inevitably bring.  


* * *


	3. Reflection: Dominic, Yuma, 1878

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=west_domposter-1.jpg)

 

 

  
The door is only half-shut when he finally staggers back, one lamp lit next to the bed and a window open to let in the still-warm night air.

Dominic's room, which he has finally started to recognize as his _home_ , and not just a place to sleep and a place to work, looks completely foreign again after sleeping almost four nights at Julien's side.

He lets his leather clutch thump to the floor and leans against the doorjamb for a minute, just letting the past week create a sort of blank buzz in his head.  One of the girls passes behind him.  "Okay there, Dom?" Leighton asks him, laying a warm hand on his shoulder. 

He turns and grins at her, and her thick blond curls bob around her face when she grins back.  "Ace, love, ta for asking."

She winks and continues on, and Dominic drags himself inside, booting the door shut behind him.

His bed is still tidy from when he last left it, five mornings previous.  And there are the notes that he didn't have time to tuck away because he was late in getting up, having gone back to bed after escorting the enthusiastic Mr. Sommerhalder to the back stairs.  He had been thoroughly knackered, and had almost passed out with Sommerhalder still there, because he had paid extra for a bit of a courie afterward.  Dominic shakes his head a little and can't help a tiny smile; it's always the nasty ones who need the reassurance in the morning. Although he wasn't actually nasty.  Just a bit.  Driven.

And the welts hadn't been too bad, either.  They'd faded by the time he was sitting at the piano with the lovely Liv, by the time he was sitting in the devil's own bloody chair in Cate's room, waiting to see if he had only helped along Julien's death.  He wished he hadn't known Julien's name at the time, and hoped that when he went it was better than if he'd bled out.  It would have been better, he'd thought, if the infection took him ranting and raving in a fever; it would have been better because the bloke would've missed his own passing.

Dominic shudders, sinking onto the bed and putting his head in his hands.  Jesus bloody Christ, he nearly killed a man, he had.  And there was a moment, wasn't there, listening to Julien shout at invisible enemies about death and misery, there was a moment when Dominic thought it would have been better if he had.

Tears leak from corners of Dominic's eyes, and he puts his palms over them, pressing harshly.  It isn't anything less than anyone else would have thought, and if he could have kept Julien here through sheer will, he would have.  And there were moments - when London was thick in Julien's reedy, dying voice - that Dominic thought he might well have done.

He's missed appointments, businessmen only in town a day or two that he couldn't reschedule.  He's not quite strapped for coin, with his wages at the stables and his free room and board and it's odd, isn't it, that he hasn't felt the need for it in the past five days.  He had woken a few times, half hard in his denims, but it had been more from the thin threads of dream, the echo of London and the brush of dirty curls through his fingers.

He scrubs at his face violently and shrugs off his suspenders, stands to strip off his shirt.  Now that Julien's fever is down, Cate says there's no need for Dom to be keeping constant vigil -- although the look on her face suggested it was never necessary, even with the threat of infection -- and she smiled, sad but real, and kissed his cheek and told him to go to bed.

There's a bowl of water standing at the washbasin, and it looks clean enough. Cate probably had one of the girls bring it in earlier for him.  He dips his hands in and splashes it on his face and neck, staring at his wobbly reflection in the water, fat drops hanging off the end of his nose and trickling down his chest.  His skin prickles up along the back of his neck and along the insides of his arms and thighs, and he shivers, even though the night is warm.  Goose walking on your grave, lad, his da used to say, and Dominic huffs out his breath to stop himself from crying again at the thought of him, stocky and strong.  He shivers again and he thinks it might be something worse than that.

He's just tired, worn thin by Julien's agony and Cate's worry and his own doubt, and not getting enough time to recouperate from his last trick.  It's those ones that are right on the line that he can never say no to, even though he knows he should.  This town is full of them, he's finding, people right on the line, sometimes with one foot dancing over it, but he supposes that's how he found himself here in the first place.

And Julien.  Julien's ten metres past the line but he's tethered to it by a thin wire and Dominic smiles a little, wipes his face with his discarded shirt, imagines Julien walking the wire, grinning and daring the thing to break.

"Christ, Monaghan," he mutters to himself, "And you wonder how you get yourself into it, don't you?"  He struggles with the dirty laces on his boots and shimmies out of the rest of his clothes before extinguishing the lamp on the bedside table and laying back, his linens cool and smelling like something spicy, maybe Sommerhalder's cologne, although Dominic doesn't remember his smelling like much of anything besides beer and a tinge of horse, and he does like to take note of things like that.  This is something sharp and slightly foreign, and it makes him think of the dark sparks of Julien's eyes, the wet, lazy curls laying against his brow.

He feels himself stiffen.  Predictable, he thinks and grins a little, but it's sex, it's something to get it all out.  He knows that, he doesn't condemn his tricks for it; he certainly isn't going to give himself a thrashing over it.  A moment of hesitation, and he sighs when he takes himself in hand, hot and a little damp and sensitive from being neglected.  He hasn't gone a day without release since he found out what sex was, since he found out what other boys were really for, and he finds himself breathing hard, thinking about Julien on the streets of London in the rain, behind a pub, pushing Dominic down to his knees.  Or maybe out in the desert, before they both found themselves here, before Julien met whatever it was that put that shadow in his eyes.

Dominic strokes himself fast and hard, squeezing his eyes shut, a stone lodged in his throat.  He can almost see it, looking down at Julien, those long fingers grabbing Dom's hips and guiding him onto Julien's prick, long, slow push inside.  He'd break his own fucking rule, he'd lean down and kiss him, his tongue in Julien's mouth to match Julien inside him, and he wants to come so badly, back in his little bed he pushes his hips up and bites down hard on his lower lip, his breath burning, trapped in his lungs.

He whines a little and the air rushes out, trembling.  He won't, he can't.  He licks his lips to get rid of the imagined taste of Julien's mouth and he squeezes himself hard; you know better, Dominic, he says to himself.  You know better. 

He rolls onto his side, sweat cooling on his lower back, and drags the thin duvet half over his side.  He presses his face into his flat pillow, breathing out to feel the heat on his face, and he cradles himself in his palm as he starts to go half soft, his balls relaxing little by little to hang against his thigh.  His heart pounds in his throat and he forces himself to count the slowing beats until he finally drifts off into a blank sleep.


	4. A Gift: Dominic, Lando, Yuma, 1878

It's not that Dominic expected a gigantic farewell celebration, bon voyage and all that, not goodbye so much as see you again. He certainly didn't expect a very discreet farewell shag, although if he had to choose one of the two, the second would be preferable, even as the less probable of two scenarios that were both highly improbable to begin with.

It's not so much to ask for, he reckons, for a handshake. A good wish or two. He didn't even want a thank you out of the deal, although again, he wouldn't have rejected it if offered. Never mind that a thank you in his fantasies for the past two evenings had quickly turned from a good firm handshake to a good firm wank, and it's probably better this way, in the end, because Julien was and is a right bastard as far as he can suss. And the last thing Dominic needs is another right bastard to take care of, especially because this one would most likely not be paying.

He's had quite enough grief for free for one lifetime, ta very much.

Still, he lingers in Cate's doorway, searching the room for anything, a note on the clean, pressed linens, a bit of blood-stiff fabric on the chair Dominic had slept the better part of a week in. Nothing, not a bit of him left.

 _Well bugger him, then_ , Dominic thinks, his belly a tight burning knot. He closes Cate's door and stalks to his room, slamming the door. Opens it and slams it again, hard enough to make the bones in his arm rattle and bugger all them if they don't like it, bugger Cate and bugger Julien, bugger him right up his ungrateful, most-likely-virgin-not-that-Dominic-cares, little arse.

He struggles out of his work clothes, tosses his muddy boots under the washbasin, and uses the leftover water from last night to get the general earth-and-horse smell off himself; it seeps into your pores after a time. Dominic's got used to the smell of hay and manure and sweat baked on by the sun, but he likes to keep as clean as he can, especially when there's a definite trick for the evening. Tonight, though, he can't be arsed, doesn't even try to get the dirt out from under his nails even, dries himself off and pulls on one of his yellowing linen shirts and a pair of old denims. After a hesitation, he puts on his brown weskit. S'hardly Cate's fault her old friend is a bloody fucking bastard, a bloody lying fucking bastard, but that's none of his business.

She's downstairs, behind the bar, and she looks up at him as he comes through the kitchen doors. Her mouth is smiling, but her eyes are hard and fiery and he grins back, pinching one of the waitresses, slapping a regular on the back. Liv is already at the piano and he tips his head at Cate in acknowledgement, settling himself onto the bench, straddling Liv, making her yelp.

"Up, love," he drawls. "Good folk paid to see you, so show off some."

She kisses his cheek and his stomach twists; he swallows back the stone in his throat, and forces himself to smile when he looks up at her. "What you reckon we should start with tonight?"

Liv rustles through the sheet music and Dominic sets his jaw. He'll look for a toff tonight; there seem to be an obscene amount of them here, and why shouldn't he. He lost a good deal of business those four days. There's a man by the front doors, looking back at him: shock of thick black hair, handsome, whisker-free, round face and there's an offer on it, isn't there. There's an offer in that slow smile, the tilted dark eyes, a large sum in the offer, a large appetite, too. Lovely.

Dominic smiles.

The doors open, and maybe it's because Dominic has spent the past several hours brooding that he has almost no outward reaction that he can feel, or maybe it's because his ruddy face has gone numb with shock.

Julien. Dominic's very own right fucking virgin-arsed bastard.

One of the girls squeals and throws her arms around him and Julien laughs, picks her up and swings her around as if he hadn't been here just a day earlier, as if he hadn't been more than half dead three days before that. Dominic stands slowly, not sure if he should be angry or relieved or a touch hysterical.

He opens his mouth to call out to him, but Julien spots him before he has a chance to. Dominic makes an abortive movement toward him, stops at the polite, blank smile on Julien's face.

 _Fool_ , he thinks, and before he realizes it, he's shoved his way to Julien, stopping just behind the small circle of girls that have gathered around him, and there's no change in Julien's eyes at all, no recognition and everyone's always told Dominic his temper has too fine a trigger. "Watch yourselves, girls," he drawls, laying on his accent thick, "this one looks like he's trouble."

Lando would be dead a dozen times over if he didn't know how to read anger in a man's face and body, and he's reading Dominic loud and clear right now. He's practically bristling with fury; it's snapping in his eyes, evident in the curl of his lips and the way his hands are twisted into his belt with white-knuckled force.

What Lando isn't quite as clear on, is why?

His hand curls more firmly around Annabelle's slender waist, tugging her in close to his side, and she slides a hand into his coat, smoothing the silk of his shirt against his chest, possibly also frisking him for presents, he thinks with a slight smirk.

"Indeed, I've seen my share," he agrees easily, curving fingertips to brush against the underside of Annabelle's bodice, though his attention is still mostly focused on Dominic, who is smiling, still, but it's the smile of a predator, sharp and uncompromising. Lando has no idea what he's done to earn that sort of a smile from Dominic, who'd been friendly enough (more than friendly enough, actually, gentle and solicitous) yesterday. Annabelle wriggles and giggles accommodatingly until his fingertips are pressing against warm skin, and inside his jacket, her fingers slide down his ribs. "Indeed, I'm quite the naughty one. Perhaps Annabelle should take me upstairs and turn me over her lovely knees."

Annabelle seems to like that idea (though Dominic's expression barely shifts). She leans into Lando and coos something filthy in his ear, and Lando lets his brows arch upward in faux shock. "Or perhaps _Annabelle_ should be turned over someone's knee," he murmurs, and her cheeks flush rosy, though her grin is wicked.

She snuggles closer, and her knee bumps softly against his thigh. It isn't hard, not at all, but Lando has to struggle not to jerk away or gasp at the deep twinge of pain it causes. "Perhaps later, cher," he says, and presses his lips to the hinge of her jaw.

Dominic makes a short, snorting sound devoid of amusement, and Lando resists the urge to frown. "I do not believe we've met," he says, shifting his hand out from around Annabelle (she pouts prettily, and Lando slides his thumb along her chin in apology) to offer it to Dominic. "My name is Julien La Fleur. I am happy to meet you."

Dominic has a brief yet satisfying fantasy where he slaps Julien's hand away. But he does shake it, and his smile feels more real than forced when those long, brown fingers grasp his firmly. "A pleasure," he says and deliberately does not look at Annabelle when she snickers under her breath. "Dominic. Dominic Monaghan."

Julien smiles politely and furrows his brow just a bit, just for a split second. Dominic wants to punch him. Or shag him. Possibly both. Julien gives a polite tug of his hand, and Dominic realizes he's still holding his hand. Definitely the former, then, and his ears burn at the very tips.

Dominic crosses his arms again. Julien swings the leather pack off his shoulder and Annabelle crowds in again, almost breathless. Dominic fights the urge to roll his eyes, and picks casually at the dirt under his thumbnail as he speaks. "You're a long way from home, eh? Don't get many of you round these parts."

"I suppose not," Lando agrees, and tips his head to tsk at Annabelle's eagerness, gently swatting her hands away while he works the ties of his pack. "Only one of me, to be precise." He glances at Dominic casually, gives him a smirk and the vaguest suggestion of a wink, which he sees by Dominic's eyes, the dark swirl of charcoal shifting to something a touch lighter, that he's caught it. "Though I could say the same of you, Dominique. Not so many of your countrymen litter the American Southwest."

He draws the flap of his pack open and dips inside, presenting a cheerfully wrapped parcel to Annabelle with a flourish. "I shan't forget that I owe you a spanking, my dear," he tells her, but her flushed, happy face makes him smile. "Though perhaps I shall defer it until you've quite earned it."

It doesn't take long to pass out gifts. He can see Cate from the corner of his eye, looking exasperated and faintly indulgent as her girls flutter and squeal and deliver kisses of thanks, and he's equally aware of Dominic standing slightly to one side of the mob, watching with his too-clever and so-telling eyes, dark grey and intent. Lando is quickly down to Cate's carefully wrapped and boxed parcel (a crystal dove, which she will pronounce useless and too expensive, but will make her eyes gleam, and he'll like as not catch her gazing softly at it at some point, when she doesn't know he's there), and the last item in the pack, a thing not as lovely as all the others, but also a thing he had made with his own two hands, which makes it different in other ways.

"Something for Cate," he says, and bows slightly in her direction, "which I will deliver later, in private," he winks wickedly at Liv, who is grinning at him and clutching her unopened gift to her chest, "and, ah--" He endeavors to look surprised.

"Why Dominique," he says, and gives Dominic a solemn look, which is, in point of fact, mostly real. "I must have known I would meet a friend today."

He passes the parcel over, this one somewhat less pretty than the others, wrapped with naught but brown paper and string, and done hastily in the wee hours of the morning, before he'd skulked out of Yuma to facilitate a more appropriate entrance.

Dominic just looks at it for a moment, and then slowly takes it, his heart battering against his ribs. His fingers feel thick and clumsy, and he holds the thing carefully, feeling the paper crackle as it gives, whatever it is soft and, well, squishy.

He assumes Julien is waiting for something more than bemusement, and if he expects thanks -- which Dominic is sure he does not -- he's got another think coming. Dominic wishes, not for the first time, that they had met under difference circumstances, because Julien has a mind to match his body, something not many blokes he's come across in Yuma can claim.

"Mssr. La Fleur, you oughtn't have done. Besides which, assuming this is not gold under here, you're massively underestimating my price." He winks to take the sting out before it can really hurt, because he has to do something to mask his utter delight at having been thought of at all. "I cost a pretty penny more than these tarts."

Annabelle and Liv both glare at him, and Dominic gives them his best innocent smile, fluttering his lashes a mite. Liv rolls her eyes and smiles back, and Dominic cuts a glance at Julien. "You see, you just bat those dead lovely dark eyes at them and they'll do anything."

Julien smiles a little and Dominic struggles to keep the flush off his face, and he rubs at an ear with one hand to cover the fact that he can feel the tips of both of them burning red. His gift crackles against his chest and Dominic hopes Julien can see that he is thankful, even if he can still feel the bite of disappointment and almost betrayal waking up to find Julien gone had caused. "Shall I open it here then, or ought I wait until I'm clear of innocent bystanders."

"Please, mon ami," he says, and gives Dominic a little nod. "I assure you, it is nothing that will impinge upon the sensibilities of the innocent." He steps a bit closer, and is aware of the girls there, opening gifts and cooing admiration at each other's prizes. It's a thing he normally likes to watch. "Although I question the innocence of everyone currently present, just on principle."

Dominic grins, a bit lopsided, but wholly charming, and Lando sees that the tips of his ears are a bit red. He can't quite help smiling, but he looks away quickly, for Dominic's sake. No need to completely humiliate him, though it's a temptation Lando can't quite deny. There's something oddly compelling about the flushed tips of his ears, and before he knows it, he's moved to stand within a foot of him and has his hand around Dominic's forearm.

Dominic looks down at Lando's hand, and then back up, his expression faintly puzzled.

"It is not so much," Lando says softly. "Not what you deserve, certainly, but I had no time."

Julien's hand is warm through the linen and Dominic knows his face is burning now, first at being given a gift at all, second at some kind of public display of affection, friendship at the very least. Whoever his trick is tonight is going to get more than his money's worth, that's for bloody sure.

"I am _much_ obliged," Dominic says roughly, affecting a thick southwest accent, and he's almost giddy to see the sparkle in Julien's eyes. He turns it over and ponders the knot on the tie. He can't remember the last time he got a gift, but his fingers still know the itch of ripping paper and ribbon and he grins wide almost despite himself, pulling the string forcibly over one soft corner, letting the paper sag out of the way.

He breathes out, feels his emotions swing up and then down sharply, clogging his throat and prickling at his eyes.

It's a bundle of lovely, soft yarn, knitted loosely but neatly, in shades of cinder and charcoal and dove grey. He pets at it, flyaway fuzzes getting caught in the bitten off parts of his cuticles, partially unravels it, wrapping it around the crook of his elbow until he has half of it gathered against his chest.

"It's a scarf," he says dumbly, unable to look up at Julien because he's always been a bit of a woman about these things, and is prone to teary jags. Julien clears his throat and Dominic clutches his fingers in it, rubbing a thumb over a length of pattern. "It's brilliant. Did you." Now he has to clear his throat, and he forces himself to look up. Julien is watching him carefully, but with a little smile playing in the furrows of his forehead.

"Did you make this yourself?" he asks quietly, and looks back down at the soft stuff in his hands, falls in love with the imperfect shading of the homespun yarn, the slightly crooked knitting that nubs the pattern.

"As a child," Lando says, "I had more energy than sense, to hear my mother tell of it. One winter there was a good deal of snow, not quite a blizzard, but enough to keep me indoors for days on end, moping about and making--" he smiles slightly, to be echoing Dominic's words, "--trouble. I believe to this day that she taught me to knit for no reason but to preserve her own sanity."

Dom's genial face breaks into a broad grin, amusement, but also what seems to be genuine pleasure, and he is holding the scarf bundled in both hands, thumbs stroking across the material. His cheeks are flushed warm, and something tightens and twists in Lando's midsection, a familiar warmth.

Dominic lets one end of the scarf fall from his hands until it is hanging loose at its full length, and then catches it again to flip it neatly 'round his neck. The different shades of grey look precisely as Lando had (hoped) thought they would, so close to Dominic's face, so close to his eyes, which are bright and swirling now with myriad shades of grey.

It's like camouflage, though he guesses it's unlikely that Dominic is aware of how his eyes give him away.

And he wonders what had possessed him, to give Dominic something like that, something to hide his most obvious tell.

The voice in his mind that answers that question sounds too much like Billy Boyd. _You know exactly why_ , it murmurs. _Never thought you'd actually meet another bloke you might like to tumble, did you? Not after what happened the first time._

 _Damn_ , he thinks, and his hand falls away from Dominic's arm, mostly because it seems... unfair to be touching Dominic while his body kindles. Because the sentiment, whatever ghost-voice from his past his mind chooses to cloak it in, is a true one. He's not exactly surprised; he isn't unfamiliar with desire. He just -- he honestly hadn't expected it to feel so… important.

Dominic's grin wilts just a bit, and Lando manages to reach for and (thankfully) capture Julien's sardonic grin. "Though I would thank you not to advertise this particular skill of mine," he says dryly, and Dominic's grin slips firmly back into place. "I should hate to have to defend my masculinity."

 _Idiot_ , Dominic thinks but smiles hard anyway because here's Julien, and he made Dominic something, and just because a bloke touches you doesn't always means he wants a shag for Christ's sake. Be happy with what you have, a concept Dominic can never seem to learn. He's much more for instant gratification and heaps of it, and he sticks his tongue out a little, catches it between his teeth and winks at Julien. "No worries, mate, I'm good with deep dark secrets," he says and, even if his grin becomes a little bit of a leer, he's done pretty much the best he can.

"So." Dominic's wound the scarf twice round his neck and has knotted it loosely in the front, and he's sure he looks like even more of a fop than Cate has accused him of before. It's soft and just really lovely, and he can't help playing the ends of it through his loose fist, stroking it over and over again. He can't remember the last time he'd been given something and no one expected anything in return. He strokes up, and Julien's eyes quickly follow the motion. Dominic feels his ears begin to go red and he clears his throat.

"So. Let me buy you a drink at least. Tell me more about this exciting world of horse riding and knitting that you come from." Dominic lets his eyes drift to the man sitting next to the door, and the man tips his head, smirks a little. Dominic raises one eyebrow and tightens his fist, pulling down firmly on the scarf.

For a moment, he forgets that Dominic has even said something that requires some sort of response. He watches Dominic's eyes slide to a man sitting near the door (back facing it, in fact, and Lando wonders briefly how long the man has been out here, how new his stint on the frontier must still be at this point, that he can even think of sitting there, so bloody _vulnerable_ ), sees the man smirk, sees something that he recognizes on the man’s face.

He glances back, and Dominic's got one brow arched up (there is a kind of clench deep in Lando's guts, mingled amusement and something else, recognition that's almost painful, because it's familiar, isn't it, he'd known someone who used to do that all the time), something warm and suggestive in his eyes, something that makes them dark grey, even with the scarf.

For the first time, it occurs to him that Cate hasn't ever had a piano player before. Liv plays, as do some of the other girls, and a couple of the regular barbacks play, but she's never hired anyone to play the piano, because it isn't really necessary. Men don't come here for the piano. And she doesn't need another barback; half the time she tends the bar herself, and she's never minded it. Lando has even done it a handful of times.

 _Why are you here?_ he thinks, and just then Dominic turns his grin on Lando, apparently done with his perusal of the man by the door, and it's open and wide and Lando isn't sure again, doesn't see it anymore, doesn't see the speculation or the suggestion or anything else.

Nevertheless, he finds his fingers curling around Dominic's elbow, guiding him toward the bar, hears himself saying, "A drink, mon ami, is just the thing. Or perhaps several, they are, after all, quite small," and Dominic's grin widens. Something like shame (not quite, but _like_ it) is lurking in Lando's chest, and he's not willing to look too closely at it, confronted with Dominic's obvious delight at Lando's acceptance, and probably it's just Lando's imagination anyway.

But he finds himself looking past Dominic's shoulder (he's talking even as he does it, distracting Dominic from the direction of his gaze, he hears himself prattling on, but he isn't really listening to what he's saying) at the man by the door, and he's irrationally satisfied by the lack of smile on the man's face, not quite a frown, but no longer that little smirk. He looks away from the man and throws an arm around Dominic's shoulders, tapping two fingers on the bar to get Farrell's attention. "Whiskey, Dominic?" he asks, turning Julien's best smile toward Dominic without allowing himself to consider why.

"'Bout time you asked." Dominic leans into Julien's side, equal parts confused by and wary of the entire thing, Julien and the scarf and going so fast from making an offer at the bloke near the door to being hauled up under Julien's long, ropy arm.

He would have thought, four days ago, that Julien might get this way when he saw Dominic and one of his tricks, even if he didn't know exactly what was going on. He knows Julien's not a shirtlifter -- even if he's pretty enough to be one, pretty enough to turn a trick, really, though probably not submissive enough, definitely not -- and Julien's arm tightens around him like he knows what he's thinking

That smile. That lovely smile, almost like a toff, like that toff in the corner, only it's almost devastating on Julien; God, what Dominic wouldn't give to show him what it would be like to be queer for just one night. No romance or any of that rubbish, just him and Julien.

 _And what would you charge him, boyo?_ Dominic feels his heart spike.

His saving grace, the shots arrive, and Dominic ducks out from under Julien's arm; deliberately, to spite himself and that niggling inside his head, he lets his hand graze over the small of Julien's back and around his hip before he steps back and raises his glass.

He grins. "What shall we drink to?"

He glances sideways for just a moment, and he can still see the bloke by the door, and then tips his glass up and against Dominic's, letting go of Julien's showman-smile and finding something realer to replace it with, a smile of his own, and he doesn't remember the last time he'd shown it to anyone other than Cate (although he does, of course, he remembers it precisely, down to the last detail).

"To new friends in the midst of familiar places, Dominic," he says, and tips the shot back, feeling it burn pleasantly (like Dominic's fingers had, skating across the small of his back, probably a coincidence of positioning, nothing more), unsurprised that Farrell had poured him a double shot of the good whiskey from under the bar, hoping he'd done the same for Dominic (he hadn't been paying attention, had been watching Dominic instead, and for all he knows he could have been throwing back a shot glass full of slop water, careless, Bloom, so bloody careless). "It's a fine thing, is it not?"

Dominic's cheeks are flushed and his eyes bright from the whiskey (Lando presumes) as he nods, and they smack their glasses down onto the bar at the same time. Lando crooks a finger, but their glasses are already being refilled (with the good stuff, he sees now) even as he does so.

"'Tis, indeed," Dominic says and grins, his voice raspy from the firewater. Farrell never gave _him_ the good stuff, and certainly not with that little leer.

It makes Dominic want to get to know Julien all the more.

He holds up his second shot and licks his lips, tilting his head back a little. "To the mother country," he laughs, "and all her bastard sons."

Julien narrows his eyes but his lips are still grinning and he clinks his glass to Dominic's. Dominic licks at the whiskey when he brings the glass to his mouth, watching just for one second as Julien's sharp Adam's apple bobs in his slender, brown throat. When he knocks it back himself and slams his glass down just a tic behind Julien, he looks back up to see Julien watching him. He holds Julien's eye and licks at the knuckle on his forefinger where the whiskey sloshed over the side.

Dominic leans into him a little, putting one elbow on the bar and canting his hips forward. "Your round, mate."

There is a long moment, with Dom's shoulder brushing his own warmly, during which Lando wants to pretend he doesn't know that Dominic knows more than Lando wants him to.

He wants to pretend it for many reasons, but in truth, the deep reason, the honest reason, is that Lando doesn't want to spend the rest of his association with Dominic either bargaining for his silence or charming it out of him. Lando doesn't dare hope for another Cate, someone he can be fearlessly himself with. He cannot even afford to consider it, and he actually twitches a little, something that wants to be a headshake, negation, but which he catches and stills before it goes that far.

He can't harbor that hope any more than he can choose to ignore that Dominic had nursed him throughout days of delirium, and that his hours unconscious had been spent deeply embroiled in darkness. And he talks in his sleep when he dreams badly. Sometimes more than just talks.

Sometimes he screams. Sometimes he cries. Sometimes he lashes out physically.

It would be foolish indeed to hope that Dominic hadn't got at least some sense out of him during that time.

He twitches two fingers at Farrell and smiles at Dominic, Julien's smile, his real smile gone as quickly as it had come, which is likely for the best. He can't afford to give it anyway.

 _To the mother country_ , Lando thinks, _Yes, indeed_ , and he takes the smallest of steps backward, barely a quarter of a step, really, but enough so there is no physical contact and no potential for it, barring intent or gross negligence. He knows immediately that Dominic has noticed the movement. The frown that crosses his face barely touches his lips for an instant, but his brows lower slightly and stay that way.

He lifts his glass, though, when Lando lifts his own, and Lando makes sure to clink them softly this time.

There is no help for it. He has no choice. Dominic, like so many others, cannot know any more than he knows now. And, like many of the girls at Cate's, he must be won over and wooed into silence. There isn't anything else to be done, and never mind that Lando can taste bile in the back of his throat.

"To good whiskey, lovely women, and excellent companionship on the road to inebriation," he says lightly, keeping nothing but Julien in his eyes, ignoring the faint gleam in Dominic's.

He's done something wrong, Dominic can suss out that much from the way Julien steps back, from the odd, hard line of his smile. "To at least two of the three, mate," he says, staying relaxed and open, nothing to fear here, Julien, love.

They drink at the same time, watching each other over the rims of their glasses.

He just needs to be soothed, Dominic thinks, and perhaps not goaded so quickly. But he couldn't help himself. He watches the honey-colored whiskey as it refills their glasses again and he feels the effects of it now, spreading lovely warmth through the veins in his shoulders and all down his arms. Julien needs soothing. He needs to trust; he may not want to, but he needs to. He needs a haven.

"Found brothers," Dominic says recklessly, and his heart is pounding in his throat. The drink, he bemoans in the back of his head. Evil, vile drink that makes him say mad things. He holds out his hand, and it seems to pulse with the beat of his blood.

Lando takes it. There's nothing else he can do.

He takes it, and Dominic's hand is warm and honest, with calluses where a workingman should have calluses (where Lando himself has them, Julien's most obvious tell), hard palm and long, agile fingers.

Lando keeps his face carefully neutral, but there is no denying, no ignoring, now, the sizzle of heat that ignites in his belly, the little jolt of want which isn't soothed in the slightest by Dominic's tongue flicking out across his bottom lip.

"Merci, Dominique," he says, and then has to smooth out Julien's voice deliberately. If he can hear the faint throb of regret in it (it complements the much more present pulse of heat in his midsection, which he cannot kill so easily), it is possible that Dominic will hear it, too, even over the noise of the taproom. "But I am afraid I am an only child, and too spoilt to change my ways now."

 _There's nothing else to do_ , he thinks grimly, and forces his hand to uncurl from around Dominic's. He doesn't look away -- he's an old hand at deceit; it's not something he's proud of, but he understands how it works, understands the need to observe the results of his own lies and live with them, understands the responsibility of it -- noting the flickering of Dominic's eyes and the quick play of half-formed emotions on his face (flash of disappointment, a little anger, something that might be hurt that Lando almost looks away from). He's briefly glad for the scarf; it's a kind of buffer against being able to see too deeply into Dominic, even understanding it, and he can't help but be selfishly glad not to have to see.

"It is just as well," he says, and his voice has gone hoarse again, so he turns away and throws back the shot of whiskey that's waiting for him to cover it. "I cannot be trusted to treat a brother properly anyhow."

Dominic almost gags on the whiskey but manages to get it all down. He's disgusted with himself, with Julien, with the bloody toff who's staring a hole clean through the back of Dominic's skull. It shouldn't matter -- he knows that. But it does. And it hurts, seeing everything just slam in his face, shut out of Julien's warm gaze, the lulling tone of his voice.

"Well, then, mate, I think on that note I'll take my leave for the evening." He grins and it actually hurts him, stretches his mouth out in ways it feels like it wasn't made to go, and he slams his glass down, upside down. He takes Julien's glass and flips it over on top of his own. "Put that last one on my tab, would you, Colin-love?"

"Fuck yourself right in your big ears, Monaghan."

Dominic laughs and pretends not to see Julien's odd, narrowed gaze. They're both smiling, and that'll have to do for now.

"See you tomorrow, I hope, my new friend," Dominic says and claps Julien on the shoulder. He's warm and solid, more solid than Dominic even remembers from the night before, and he knows this is how it happens to him, every time; he takes a fancy to someone and the minute he closes his eyes he can't remember what he looks like, what he smells like, sounds like, and the not-remembering is more torturous than if every detail were burned in his brain because every meeting is like the first time, like a punch in his gut.

Dominic winks extravagantly and turns to find his trick half standing, thick black eyebrows raised.

Dominic licks his lips and tilts his head back toward the stairs. He holds up three fingers and the toff nods, his cruel-looking, sharp mouth twisting up on one side.

He refuses to look back at Julien as he climbs the stairs. With a little luck, he'll be distracted from that deceptively delicate face for the next handful of hours, and by then, maybe he'll have convinced himself he doesn't care.

 _One at a time, Dominic_ , he says to himself, putting a little snap-swing in his hips as he puts one boot in front of the other, deliberately. One step at a time.

 _Be able to look your lies in the eye_ , Bills had said once. He was referring to poker, of course, to bluffing, but it was good advice, which has served Lando well over the years. He lies as little as is feasible most of the time anyhow, although that's a great deal more than he'd believed possible when he knew Billy. He remembers how uncomfortable he'd been with lying, even in the fairly limited capacity that bluffing demanded, but he doesn't remember the discomfort itself. He hasn't felt it in a long time.

Lying simply is, a necessity of his existence, and it rarely bothers him. It never bothers him with strangers.

 _But you can't really tell yourself that Dominic is a stranger, can you? Not with any honesty._

He doesn't, couldn't have even when he first woke with Dominic at his bedside. Even with Cate, it hadn't been like this. It took some time before he felt he knew her, and even more time before he felt that she wanted to know him. It actually hadn't really started to happen until the second time, despite nights spent with Cate's cool, calm hands easing him out of the nightmare landscape of his own mind, despite hours and days and weeks spent in her company.

Whatever the reason, Dominic doesn't feel like a stranger, lying to him doesn't feel like lying to a stranger, and Lando can't deny that he hadn't been able to look Dominic in the eye. In the end, he looked away, and if Dominic hadn't fled, perhaps Lando would have. It's even likely that he would've.

He isn't sure what that means.

It turns out that he doesn't have time to really think on it, either. The bloke by the door stands up, a movement Lando registers from the corner of his eye, and tugs a pocket watch on a chain from his vest pocket. He examines it for a moment, mouth twisted into a sort of anticipatory smile that bears more resemblance to a leer than anything else, and turns toward the stairs.

Lando is moving on an intercept course before he lets himself think of what he's doing; when the understanding comes, inserting itself into his brain in the same way a knife will slide between ribs, if it's angled just right, almost painless for several seconds in spite of the lethal effects, he doesn't hesitate, though his stride falters, just for a moment. Not enough to keep him from reaching the foot of the staircase at the same time as the bloke, and not enough to stop him from inserting himself bodily between the man and the way upstairs.

 _What the hell are you doing, what the hell is this?_ part of his mind is berating, but it's distant enough to be ignorable.

 _I don't like the look of him_ , he answers himself (and is his mental voice somewhat defensive?) even as he's turning a smile on the bloke, and it's not one of Julien's smiles at all.

This smile has been on Lando's face before, briefly, but has occupied a spot in Ruben's repertoire for quite some time. The man frowns and tilts his head to one side, clearly not understanding the significance of the look.

"Excuse me," he says, passingly polite, though there's a mixture of impatience and confusion in his clipped and very Eastern voice. "I was just on my way upstairs."

"Non, Monsieur," Lando says quietly. "I do not think so. I believe that you were just leaving."

Lando is aware of a few people close by, of Cate behind the bar -- and she _would_ notice, as the person Lando least wants to do so -- and he knows if he were to really think this through, he'd come to the conclusion that this is a bad idea. Too likely to draw attention to himself, too likely to have repercussions.

Nevertheless.

The man moves as though to step around him, and Lando finds himself adjusting his own stance accordingly; he lets his coat slide open to show his belt and his knives, and he's disgustingly gratified with the resultant expression on the man's face, the sudden uncertainty and the glitter of nerves.

He isn't particularly surprised when the man blusters -- sitting with his back to the door had already indicated a seriously underdeveloped sense of self-preservation as well as a decided lack of simple common sense -- and draws himself up; he's even less surprised when all Lando has to do is narrow his eyes and drop the smile to deflate the man.

Typical, really, and certainly Dominic deserves more than this, surely he wouldn't want a bloke like this in his bed if he knew...

He forces his mind away from that; it's none of his business who Dominic takes to bed. He has no right...

But he doesn't let himself finish that thought either.

"... and you can be certain I won't be bringing my business back to this establishment," the bloke is huffing fussily, but he's also backing away, and that's good enough for Lando.

He stays where he is until the bloke actually leaves, and only then does he return to the bar.

Farrell is at the far end, busy with others, but there is a shot glass full of mellow whiskey waiting for him there, nonetheless. He doesn't have to look up to see how; he can smell Cate close by.

He throws it back, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and trying to ignore the restless feeling at the base of his spine, the dampness of his palms, and what those things mean. He sees Cate's hand slide across the bar to retrieve the glass.

"Another?" she asks, and that's all, but there is a wealth of emotion and inflection within that single word. Lando can't quite bring himself to look at her. Instead, he merely shakes his head briefly, feeling his jaw tighten anxiously. "All right, then," she says, and he senses more than sees her move away to tend to her customers, leaving him without a word, neither recrimination or encouragement.

Of course.


	5. Connections: Dominic, Lando, Yuma, 1878

Dominic smoothes his hair down at his nape. He's sweating -- he's had a little more to drink than he normally would when he was turning a trick. But he has himself under control; as a matter of fact, he's in much rarer form than if he were stone sober. He feels ready to be filled -- in more ways than one -- and so what if perhaps it's not the exact way he wants. He can give this one something, and this one can give it to him. Good enough.

He shifts, looks around to make sure no one's looking, then slides his hand into his denims, canting a hip to give himself more room. He was on the verge of being hard, really, since that first shot of whiskey, so it doesn't take much coaxing to firm himself up, get the head of his prick to slip out from its foreskin. He licks his other palm and switches hands, wraps a firm fist around himself and pulls twice.

He's learned to not get lost in it, to let the trick get him hard so he can stay hard, so he can hold it for however long he needs to. But this is dangerous ground, like the last time he let a fantasy take him in the three minutes between contact and acceptance, and one of the girls caught him with his hand in his pants. He can't help thinking about Julien, thinking about the dark of the night the first time the thought came to him, Julien weak and hurt and Dominic waking from a dream of those hands on him.

A low grunt escapes him and he pulls his hand out, tilts his head back and waits, his prick twitching and bloody furious at the interruption.

"Down, boy," he murmurs and crosses one leg over the other, propping himself up with one boot against the wall.

He's just closed his eyes, the threads of dream-Julien weaving themselves back together and squeezing his belly and his balls in their net, when they suddenly solidify and Dominic's heart leaps into his throat.

"Waiting for someone?"

Dominic turns quickly and sees Julien standing there, casual and cunning, once again like the big cats at the rodeo.

"You know I am," he says, gruffly, arousal making his throat tight. "What it is to you, I'm not quite sure."

 _Oh, God, that was the absolute worst thing to say ever_ , Lando thinks, and bites back a groan. It doesn't help that Dominic's voice, when he answers, is a half-octave lower than the one he uses downstairs, and rough with some kind of fierce emotion. It only makes that anxious twisting in Lando's belly worse, the tension in his spine greater. His palms are downright clammy now, worse than they had been downstairs, even after five minutes had gone by with him drying them on his trousers every other minute.

The combination of shadows and that damned scarf makes it impossible for him to see what's in Dominic's eyes -- never mind what's on his face, the tight jaw and the vertical furrows between his brows, Lando knows better than anyone that those things can be feigned -- and he isn't even sure how he got up here to begin with, isn't sure when he made the decision, though he remembers slipping through the kitchen and up the back stairs clearly enough.

 _What the hell am I doing?_ he wonders, but he doesn't dare even try to answer his own question. And he can't think what to say, but his feet are carrying him closer and closer to Dominic without his cooperation. He just wants to see Dominic's eyes, Lando tells himself, and knows it isn't true. He doesn't stop, though, and Dominic takes half a step back, his shoulder blades bumping into the wall, but he doesn't pull away when Lando reaches up and catches hold of the scarf and tugs it away from his neck. The material is soft and nubby in Lando's sweaty hands, and Dominic's chest is hard and warm against the backs of his fingers as he tugs it away.

"The yanks've got a word for that," Dominic says, automatically winding his hand into the end of the scarf and tugging back. Their chests collide, hands all tangled up in the wool together and mashed between them. He can smell the whiskey on Julien's breath, see his pupils constrict to little pebbles. "S'called Indian-giving." He smiles a little at Julien's raised eyebrow. "Though I never did see an Indian take back a gift."

He tilts his head and the whiskey and Julien's hands make him bold. Julien's lovely, fine-boned nose brushes against Dominic's inelegant one for one moment and Dominic's chest expands with anticipation. He lets loose of the scarf, and it trails through his fists as he leans back, until it's looped around the back of his neck, secured only by Julien's insistent fingers.

"You never did answer me," Dominic says, sliding one palm back and forth along one length of the scarf -- the wool makes his skin tingle, and the itch runs up his arm and through his shoulders, down his ribs, like lightning. Julien licks his lips and Dominic's already lost the fight. "What business of yours is it who I wait for?"

"It is not, certainement," Lando says absently, and now that Dominic's hands aren't fumbling with his among the coils of the scarf he can push it away and see what's really in Dominic's eyes, He holds a faint smile on his own lips -- he can feel it, a curling smirk that is Julien's customary wicked smile, though perhaps a slightly strained version of it -- that is designed more to conceal the furious tumult of his real feelings, _Lando's_ feelings, than to express anything.

He isn't sure what he expects to see or what he wants to see. He just wants to _see_ (a terrible lie, he knows, he wants more than that, he just can't quite bring himself to think of it until he knows whether or not it's a futile want; he is in no hurry to repeat his past mistakes, and just knowing a bloke likes other blokes isn't enough) if it's there or if he just wants it to be. He knows what he looks like well enough, and he knows that it's a distinct asset with both women and men (sometimes in different ways, and sometimes in not-so-different ways).

He also knows that the only other man he had ever truly wanted had not wanted him, and he understands that this want, like almost everything else, is colored in his vision by his past, warped by Bills into something less simple than it might otherwise be.

So even when he sees it plainly, Dominic's eyes a hazy swirl of darkling desire, it takes him long seconds to believe in it.

 _It's his job to make you see that, it's how he makes his living_ , Billy whispers dryly in some masochistic corner of his mind, and it sparks another of those moments of red rage in the dark recesses of his skull, the kind that always catch him off-guard, though they are actually moderately frequent. _To hell with you, Bills_ , he snaps silently, aware of the unsettling near-madness of biting at what is essentially a figment of his imagination, but not quite able to stop himself. _It was there before, dammit, it was..._

He stops the thought because it's not important. It doesn't matter. He turns his back -- figuratively speaking -- on the cool voice that he's never managed to silence in spite of years of trying, and focuses his attention on Dominic instead.

The unlikely gunmetal of Dominic's eyes are showing glimmers of curiosity as well as desire, but he is still, unmoving and apparently calm. Lando's palms are pressed against the wall on either side of Dominic's shoulders -- he doesn't know when he'd done that -- with the scarf pressed between skin and wood, holding it out of his way.

He can feel Dominic's breath ghosting across his jaw, and he feels like a stranger to himself. He wonders distantly if this is how Cate feels about him, having to feel out his edges anew every time. For the first time in a very long time, Lando isn't sure where this is going, is acting on impulse. He thinks it isn't as frightening as it should be. Nowhere near, considering the kind of danger he could be putting himself (and Dominic, don't forget that) in.

"I sent him away," he says, not entirely certain that Dominic won't be outraged at Lando's blatantly high-handed behavior, but unwilling to do anything else without admitting it, at least that one shred of honesty. "I do not think he will be coming back."

Dominic blinks. And blinks again. He's vaguely aware of his jaw hanging agape, but he can't help himself. "Sent him away," he repeats dumbly, and Julien is solemn, drawing himself up a little, his elbows bending out to fence Dominic closer into his chest. No, he wouldn't be coming back, not with this long, dangerous bloke standing between good health and nothing more than a rent boy.

His first instinct, with the sharp smell of Julien's sweat in his nostrils and the unbelievable heat rolling off that strong, brown throat, is to relax back, tilt his body open, because Julien will accept, he can see that. Julien is breathing hard and fast and half looks like he's not sure where he is, who he's speaking to, but what Julien wants is obvious, to Dominic at least, if not to Julien himself.

 _I have what you're looking for_ , he thinks, hotly, and instead he says, "And I suppose you're here to take his place, eh?"

Dominic feels the thrill of desire and need and adrenaline pumping through him, the words half a trap to draw Julien closer, half a net that Dominic is already tangled in. He can't stop looking at the place where Julien's collar lays open, the top two buttons unfastened, and he remembers smooth, hairless skin stretched taut over strong bones and hard muscle.

"I'm to...what?" he spits, his pulse pounding between his legs; his body goes receptive and relaxed, his knees falling open to rub against the inside of one of Julien's thighs, "I'm to fall for that iron-fast honesty?"

Lando is almost -- _almost_ \-- amused.

Dominic's voice is sharp and harsh, not quite cutting, but only because Lando doubts Dominic is the sort of bloke that cuts other people with his voice deliberately. In direct contrast, he has gone sort of soft and biddable physically, his body resting loosely against the wall, head tipped back while his eyes flicker to Lando's throat, thighs slightly parted. His mouth and his body are working at cross-purposes, and part of Lando -- the part that is Julien, he supposes -- would like to tease Dominic with it, would like to point out this discrepancy with honey-soft words.

The part of him that is Lando, though, is too intent upon Dominic's face to bother with teasing. Lando's mouth is dry and his sweating palms are dampening the wool of the scarf. He is almost unbearably aware of the flush staining Dominic's face and neck, burning at the tips of his ears, and of the quick, uneven hiss of his breathing. Dominic's teeth are bared, his eyes slightly narrowed, but not so much that Lando can't see the heat rippling in them, or how dark they've become, and he doesn't believe it comes from anger. At least not entirely.

Dominic smells like chocolate and whiskey and clean, rich earth after a good, hard rain, a ridiculous combination, but somehow perfect for Dominic, somehow just exactly appropriate. The rightness itself is slightly nerve wracking, actually, the simple, deeply-rooted feeling that this is a good thing, the _right_ thing. Lando's never felt anything quite like it, and his first inclination is to distrust it, to jerk himself back from such honeyed certainty, but.... He's come this far, hasn't he? He's engaged in what is certainly absolute insanity, but it would be pointless to back off now. Any possible damage -- to his reputation, to his alter ego, to his… well, it hardly matters -- is done, if there is to be any.

"I do not intend to ask you to 'fall' for anything," he murmurs. "I did not intend to... interfere, to be frank with you." He shakes his head a little, doesn't quite smile, and finds himself telling Dominic another truth. " Yet here I am."

"Indeed," Dominic breathes, "Here you are. And not as my brother?" Dominic feels his face throb with the blood rushing to it and he licks his lips. His whole body feels hot and prickly, sweat slicking the small of his back and the nape of his neck.

"Julien--" Dominic's pride wants to dismiss Julien, just say fuck off, you, I don't need your power money or your pity money, but. But. He swallows hard, reaches up to slide the tips of his fingers over the back of Julien's rigid hand, strokes gently along the seemingly delicate bones in his wrist.

His pride, it would seem, is about as soft as his prick is hard, and really, he wants to wipe that look off of Julien's face, wants the smile that he got downstairs back, the tilt and crinkle of those fucking gorgeous eyes when Dominic wound the scarf around his neck.

"Come with me," he rumbles, surprising himself with his own intensity, the realization of how much he wants it.

"You don't have to … offer me anything," Lando says, feeling his belly tighten almost alarmingly at Dominic's deep, rumbling invitation. "I did not come here to entrap you, Dominique, I do not expect... _ah_..."

Dominic manages to interrupt Lando's attempt to give Dominic an out, let him retreat if that's what he wants, by arching forward slightly, giving Lando the briefest of impressions of the rigid heat of Dominic's groin brushing against his own thigh.

It kills Lando's voice like nothing in his experience; it withers up and dies in his throat, replaced by a low, shuddery sounding exhalation, which is in turn cut off by the tilt of his lips against Dominic's, and it's deceptively easy, essentially an exact reenactment of that first time, a gentle, careful press of lips that feels like the most important thing that could happen.

He hasn't done this. Not with a bloke, not since Bills, though he's had more opportunities than he would have believed possible as the boy that had clumsily propositioned his teacher and companion. He had come to believe that either he would only ever want Bills that way (perhaps Bills was right, perhaps he had been a stupid boy who didn't understand _what_ he wanted at all) or that Bills had killed the desire in him, made it too risky, to potentially disastrous, for his body to accept.

This is different.

The difference is Dominic. The difference is in the tightening of Dominic's hand around Lando's wrist and in the feel of Dominic's lips sliding open to gasp softly against Lando's lips, and he had wanted, Jesus, it's what he had hoped for then, and as soon as his brain accepts that there will be no rejection (no shove, no fight, no cataclysmic falling out that will shape Lando for the rest of his life), he is pressing Dominic back against the wall with his entire body, one hand curling around the back of Dominic's neck with fierce pressure, aware of a low, growling sort of moan for several seconds before he realizes that it's coming from _him_.

Julien's mouth is -- fuck, it's dead lovely, soft and wet, his lips cool and his breath warm. Dominic's brain kicks into instinct as Julien's hand goes tight on his nape, digging into his neck hard, desperate; he opens his mouth to Julien's soft growls, coaxing lips to part, slicking his tongue into Julien's lush, wet mouth.

Aware of the differences in their heights, Dominic tilts his head up, letting his knees bend and his hips slide against Julien's, pressing in and up against the hot, hard ridge of Julien's prick behind his trousers. He breaks away when Julien pushes against him again, twisting his fingers hard into Dominic's hair. "Easy," Dominic murmurs. "Easy."

He lips his way onto Julien's mouth again, slowly, gently, breathing hot and even, trying to calm his shuddering heart. "Come with me," he says again, holding fast to Julien's wrist. He grins against Julien's mouth, lapping quickly into the crease. "At least out of the hallway, yeah?"

Lando blinks at Dominic for a moment, and then manages to gather himself enough to step back so Dominic isn't squashed against the wall. He drags a hand through his hair, mussing Julien's artful curls, and nods at him to lead the way.

Dominic's smile broadens slightly -- a brightness that ought to contradict the sleety gleam of his eyes, but somehow does not, somehow fits just fine -- and turns and takes one step to the left, twisting the knob on the door and flinging it open. The room beyond is grey, moonlight the only illumination; the only thing Lando can make out clearly in the gloom is the pale white expanse of sheets on Dominic's unmade bed.

"Come in," Dominic says, and Lando is moving to do so before the words are even half out, jostling lightly against Dominic's elbow as he holds the door open for Lando to step inside.

"I beg your pardon," Lando murmurs, and Dominic laughs, a rich roll of mellow sound that is inexplicably one of the most desperately erotic things Lando can imagine. His belly clenches tight as his dick responds to the sound, twitching and probably dampening Julien's immaculate dress trousers; the writhing inferno of pulsing nerves centered at the base of his spine are driving him slowly mad, but at least his hands are no longer shaking, though they are rolled so tightly into fists that Lando isn't certain that's any better.

"Home sweet home," Dominic says, and toes off one boot and then the other. He isn't looking at Lando now, and there are several feet between them, but Lando thinks he can hear every creak of bone and sinew as Dominic extends his arms above and slightly behind his head, knitting his hands together to stretch, and Lando _knows_ he can smell that musky, earthy smell that he'd noted on Dominic before, though that may just be a matter of being inside the small, enclosed space in which Dominic spends his free time and conducts all of his... business.

It hardly matters what the cause is; the effect is that Lando feels like he's breathing Dominic in, inhaling him in place of air, and it's dizzying and disorienting; he ignores it. He can't maintain even an instant of concern while he's watching the stretch of Dominic's body, his rough shirt pulled taut over his well-muscled chest and flat belly. Dominic is broader than Bills if not any taller, he thinks, and then shoves the thought out of his mind with vicious persistence. He refuses to dwell in memory while he's in this room; Billy doesn't belong here, and even if he can't quite banish the phantom that dwells in his mind, he can bloody well keep Billy out of this place, this next few hours.

"Take your coat off, Julien," Dominic invites, his voice a warm curl that tickles at the knot of nerves Lando is currently attempting to ignore (without much success). "Stay awhile."

Then Dominic's long, agile fingers are on the coat in question, the buttons falling away from their holes under his attention, and maybe Lando should be more nervous about this, but it simply isn't nerves he's battling. He's been a lover since he had learned how, and it's one of his most developed skills, second only to poker, perhaps.

It isn't nerves that force him to direct all his attention to holding himself still as Dominic brushes Lando's coat off of his shoulders, catching it handily before it falls to the ground, hanging it neatly over the back of a chair.

Not nerves, but pure and desperate want, the kind of aching, needy desire that he can only barely remember from being a much younger man, and when Dominic's fingertips rest lightly against the top buttons of his shirt, Lando's control breaks spectacularly. He bats Dominic's hands gently away so that he can tug and pull at Dominic's shirt, only half aware that he's kissing Dominic again, hands working without the benefit of his eyes or his mind (deeply aware of the heat of Dominic's chest and the scent of him, stronger this close, and his lips, slick and open and willing, and God, he tastes so damned _good_ ), but Lando doesn't need his eyes.

He's always been good with his hands.

 _Christ._

Dominic's heart leaps into his throat and his limbs go electric; he struggles with Julien for one moment, not against him, butting his head forward so their teeth clack painfully, his fingers sliding firmly down to anchor into Julien's hips as he shoves Dominic's shirt off his shoulders. He just wants to test, make sure he's read Julien right, although truth be told it wasn't so much reading as it was knowing. Dominic _knows_ , knows what he wants and what he needs, and he can't wait to show Julien that he can get both from Dominic.

He takes a step back as Julien takes a step forward, letting him guide them both to the bed. Julien puts a knee up on the mattress behind Dominic and he sinks slowly down, letting Julien control the pace, letting Julien's big, capable hands support him until he's half-reclining with Julien's hard body over him.

Dominic can't catch his breath with Julien's mouth still fierce and demanding against his own. He thinks, madly, about the sheets, how he hadn't changed them, how he doesn't want to strip them off despite that, because he thinks Julien might want his imprint on Dominic's bed, and furthermore, buggered if Dominic himself doesn't want to be marked.

"Yes," he hisses, and describes the muscled slats of Julien's ribs with the length between his thumb and forefinger as Julien bites his lips, catches Dominic's tongue between his teeth.

He feels he'll burn to cinders if they don't get bare-arsed _right now_ , and he fumbles between them, letting go his support on the mattress, giving himself wholly to the cradle of Julien's arms. Julien pushes, drives his knee between Dominic's spread legs, and Dominic's hands freeze on the top button of Julien's smart trousers; Dominic's laughter comes on a half-moan.

"Permission to board, Mssr.," he breathes and grins, lets his head fall back. "You look a man who keeps his promises, and I think we both like my fingers where they are, thanks."

"I like them more where they _will_ be," Lando murmurs, half-laughing, because love-talk apparently isn't that different with Dominic than with any of his housemates, is just as easy and bawdy and full of heated fun (something he hadn't been sure of, hadn't really expected). He grins and arches a brow at Dominic, and then huffs out a shuddery breath when Dominic, grinning as well, lets his fingertips trail downward and across the bulge at Lando's groin for a moment, and then twists his wrist so that he's cupping Lando's dick in the warm curve of his palm.

"I'll wager that's right," Dominic agrees, apparently amused at the sudden stutter in Lando's breathing, or perhaps it's the tightening of Lando's hands on his back, his fingers curling, digging tips into Dominic's warm skin. There's a low-pitched rumble from Dominic, and a subtle but effective arching of his back, which leaves his hands free to work on Lando's trousers while simultaneously pushing his groin up against Lando's thigh again.

Lando's not familiar with being on the receiving end of that particular move, but his thigh flexes and pushes firmly against Dominic like it knows what it's doing, and Dominic groans, his lips falling open, lower lip shining and wet. Lando makes a mental note to remember that move in the future before he gives in to the urge to lean down -- his body a loose curl to allow Dominic's hands the room they need -- and lap at Dominic's lips, which are curled into a slipshod smile around the soft noises escaping him.

He splays a hand across Dominic's chest, sweeping it across his skin just to feel it, the heat of it making Lando's palm tingle. Without thought, he sweeps the side of his thumb across a nipple, and Dominic, _Goddamn_ , Dominic tips his head back and moans, an unabashed and deeply masculine sound that drives home what Lando's doing more acutely than anything up to this point. His supporting hand slips -- abruptly sweaty-palmed again -- and they both sort of sprawl onto the bed, and Lando finds himself lying chest to chest atop Dominic.

Dominic laughs a little breathlessly, and Lando thinks distractedly that he might want to at least mention his lack of experience in this particular area, but he can't quite bring his brain into focus with his dick pushed hard against Dominic's, the heat and pressure leaving no doubt in his mind that whatever the reasons, Dominic's enjoying himself.

Lando's hands find their way to Dominic's belt, and they're almost wrestling, hands and forearms bumping and getting in one another's way as they each try and divest the other of clothing neither of them want any longer. Lando eventually wins the pseudo-battle by jamming his lips down on Dominic's to distract him with desperate deliberation.

 _Never done this before_ , Dominic thinks, _go easy_ and -- "Christ," he bleats, biting Julien's lower lip hard because his quick, clever hands have got inside Dominic's denims and there, oh, Jesus, "There." His voice has gone thick and gravelly and there's just no room to reciprocate, hard, callused hand on his prick, oh fuck.

He's supposed to be the professional here, but he suddenly can't think with the pressure of Julien's fingers funneling around him, short, dense nails scratching through his pubic hair. Dominic's belly jumps at the contact, almost more intimate than Julien holding Dominic's prick in his hand, and he sighs, giving willingly over to that demanding mouth. Julien is controlling him with more brute force than experience, and maybe he's testing Dominic, testing how far a man can be pushed.

 _Push me_ , he wants to say, and it's almost like Julien hears because he pushes his knee hard against Dominic's balls, twists the hand around his dick.

"Ah!" Dominic shoves his hips forward and his hands dig into Julien's waist, trying to burrow in, pulling uselessly at the tiny buttons that hold his braces into his trousers.

Julien freezes, his mouth goes slack against Dominic's.

He's skittish, always skittish, and Dominic is suddenly brought back to the present, pulls his head back together. Dominic's first time with a man he hadn't known that he might need to be careful, he didn't know people could be cruel, didn't know to be gentle, and he remembers it was all laughter and soothing correction from Matthew's best friend. Dominic knows it's a different thing for his Julien, knowing distrust and cruelty (Dominic can feel that, almost, would know it even if he hadn't heard the way Julien cries out in his sleep, witnessed the haunted quality of his face when it should have been relaxed and peaceful; it's like Julien puts out barely there signals, like smoke signals tattered by the wind that tickle at Dominic's nose, the scent of wordless understanding, like something in Julien speaks to Dominic, echoes in the silent stretches of his mind or heart, but it doesn't bear thinking about, Dominic doesn't even want to know what that means, not _now_.

And yet with the knowing, Julien doesn't want to hurt him, and that warms Dominic's heart.

"S'alright, love," he says, and pushes himself hard against Julien's knee, leans in to bite at Julien's flat, brown nipple. "Whatever you want."

"Mon Dieu," Lando manages, a fervent gasp; Dominic's lips are slick and hot, his teeth sharp little glints of pleasure against Lando's chest, and he can't think what he wants to do with an invitation like that echoing impossibly in his ears. "I want, je désire, Dominic, Dominic," but all he actually manages to do is arch his back so that Dominic's lips have free access to his chest, and curl his hand harder around the hard length of Dominic's dick, which feels sleek and smooth and hotter than should be possible tucked into his palm.

Dominic strains against Lando's thigh, and it occurs to him fleetingly that it's Dominic's way of showing that Lando hadn't hurt him. But Dominic growls softly, almost a purr, and Lando forgets to think about it anymore. He'll just have to trust Dominic to tell him if he does something wrong.

Dominic murmurs something unintelligible when Lando pulls back, uncurling his hand from around Dominic's shaft -- the air prickles coolly against Lando's wet skin, almost an ache without the warmth of Dominic's mouth -- and curls impatient and not entirely steady fingers around the tops of Dominic's denims, jerking them down the thick, muscular length of his legs.

Then Lando stands there for a moment, Dominic's trousers loosely clasped in his fists, and just looks.

Dominic doesn't come close to Lando's height, but his body is perfect ("Si bon," he whispers faintly, and Dominic flushes deeply, whether he understands the words or not), all hard, lean lines and deeply shadowed angles; he is so unambiguously _male_ that Lando can't breathe for a moment, can't quite grasp that this is happening. In the silence, he hears how Dominic's breathing is ragged, and can't keep his eyes away from Dominic's dick, the dark, flushed skin, the slight curve, the bright smear of something silvery with moonlight across the glans, which Lando can also feel, wet, smeared along the thin, tender webbing between thumb and first finger.

His belly flutters, and he drops the denim in his fists to raise his right hand to investigate. He can feel the twin storms of Dominic's eyes watching him. The flutters in his belly stoke up, like feeding coal into a steam engine, and heated shudders travel the length of his spine. He slides the index finger of his right hand through the cooling fluid, rubs it thoughtfully between index finger and thumb, feeling the grease-like slickness of it, in all ways similar to his own. It doesn't occur to him not to touch the finger to his tongue next, as his mouth has always been as much a part of lovemaking for him as his hands -- it tastes like unripe nectarines, he thinks, bitter and flat but not bad -- and he hopes to have his mouth on a hell of a lot more of Dominic in the very near future, so he's curious, just curious, but Dominic murmur-gasps, "Oh," and Lando glances up at him to find that Dominic has closed his eyes. His voice is unsteady when he adds, "oh, shit," and Lando smiles, the clenching need in his belly momentarily eclipsed by simple pleasure at being the cause of that look on Dominic's face, that look that says so clearly that Lando has done something that makes Dominic _burn_.

 _"Whatever you want."_ Dominic had said it and Lando will not allow the slight quiver of guilt that's flickering in the shadowy corners of his mind stop him; Lando wants _everything_ , wants it fiercely, standing here with his hand slick from Dominic's dick and the wholly enchanting image of Dominic sprawled on his back with his dick hard and his hands curled into angular fists.

He is quite sure that is more than Dominic knows he is bargaining for. Far more than Julien's humor and sense of fun. But the offer is there, the bet is on the table, so to speak, and Dominic's played this game before (though perhaps not with the deck stacked so thoroughly against him). If he likes his hand well enough to make such a bet, Lando doesn't have the strength to fold.

"Je le veux tout," he says, knowing Dominic won't understand, aware that it's like offering a prize for hitting a target with an unloaded gun, but it's the best he can do.

And even though Dominic doesn't understand, _can't_ know what Lando's saying, Dominic opens his eyes, and they are dark as slate and deep as wells, and says, "Come on."

Dominic can barely speak with Julien _looking_ at him like that, can barely even _breathe_ , but he has to keep himself collected because Julien is struggling, is so close to flying apart; Dominic wants him to, wants to help him let go. But to do that, he needs to stay in control. Or, he needs to hold Julien's control while he's... otherwise occupied.

"Anything," Dominic says, and slides a hand over his own naked belly, letting his nails score raised, pink trails across his abdomen, over his navel. "Everything."

Julien is possibly the most gorgeous man Dominic's ever seen, not so much in face or body alone, though he is beautiful there, no doubt about that, but there's something, something in him that draws Dominic, a need that's so strong Dominic feels like his whole life, every tragedy and happiness has been for this moment.

It makes his chest actually hurt to think that, to tie up all this emotion in this man, dangerous and probably deceitful. But -- and it takes Dominic's breath away again, when Julien slides his braces off his shoulders, when he bares his teeth in not-quite-a-smile -- there's something between them that he's powerless to stop. That he doesn't _want_ to stop, at least not yet.

Julien's braces frame his open trousers, where Dominic can see the spray of black hair fanning up and leading to his navel, drawing his eyes down to the thick ridge barely concealed there, a sliver of coffee-skin, blood-flushed pink. It makes Dominic's lick his lips, heave in his breath.

"Please," he says and struggles up, splaying his hands on Julien's sharp hipbones, stroking his thumbs into the open material.

"S'il te plait," Lando echoes without meaning to, his attention mostly devoted to the feel of Dominic's thumbs, rough and stroking lightly against Lando's hipbones. His blood feels like it's thrumming just beneath the surface of his skin, and the tingles originating from the place Dominic is touching are fierce enough to make him clench his teeth against a moan.

"Please is shorter," Dominic murmurs, his breath hot and moist, so close to the tender skin beneath Lando's belly button that his hips arch forward as though drawn. Dominic doesn't hesitate, just flicks his tongue against that skin, and then kisses it, tongue then lips, and Lando's barely even aware of Dominic's hands getting rid of Lando's trousers. The fingers of his right hand have curled around the back of Dominic's neck, more gently than before; Lando only becomes aware of his trousers around his ankles when a warm hand curls around his naked hip.

He steps out of them and toes them out of the way, a wave of unreality crashing through his mind as Dominic mouths his hipbone and runs his hands down the backs of Lando's thighs. He realizes his left hand is hovering uncertainly above Dominic's sandy hair, and he sighs a little as he lets it descend, lets it rest lightly on the top of Dominic's head and then pushes fingers into his hair. Looking straight down, he can see Dominic's back, the bumps of his spine visible down the center, the lines of his shoulder blades sharp and poetic, the play of muscle beneath skin it's own kind of poetry. Dominic moans softly as Lando slides his hand around Dominic's neck and down his back, and Lando feels the vibration beneath his hand and against his belly, buzzing and wet from Dominic's lips. Lando doesn't bother to bite back his answering moan this time, and Dominic's hands tighten on his hips, almost painful for a moment.

Dominic looks up at him, and Lando's breath stalls in his throat at the tenebrous, churning mélange of yearning and appreciation he can see in Dominic's eyes. He knows well enough what he looks like, but he feels the heat in his face and neck anyway, a helpless response, not to that look -- he's had that look directed at him a hundred times -- but at that look from _this_ man. Dominic's lips quirk and his eyes soften, the inky color retreating to something mistier and less heated; he looks charmed, which only makes Lando's face burn hotter. He doesn't remember the last time he blushed.

Dominic's hand strokes slowly, soothingly, along his flank. "S'alright," he murmurs, and Lando doesn't have time to respond before Dominic dips his head down and there is a swathe of hot, wet bliss along the underside of Lando's dick that nearly unhinges his knees, draws a hoarse, shocked sound of pleasure from his throat.

Dominic has always loved sucking men off. There's something about it, it's so intimate, it gives him control and strips it away at the same time. He loves the taste of a man, the smell, the feel of a heavy prick in his mouth. This is, from the first instant his tongue touches Julien, different. More. Not a trick, can’t be, it’s mad to try to think of him that way; he has long since crossed the line of client and is in more tenuous territory.

Julien makes this wounded sort of noise, a whine, almost, and Dominic inhales the head of his dick into his mouth, suckling around the slit, just to see if he'll make it again. Julien smells sharp, saddle-oil and leather and the sweat-damp wool of his trousers. He smells of the stable, of hard work, and it's comforting, familiar.

Up close, his skin is even more magnetic, the lines of browned and pale making the creases between thigh and groin stand out, black fur between his legs wet with sweat, glittering, making Dominic want to bury his face in it. He moves forward, once, letting Julien slide all the way in, bump the back of his throat, and Julien's hand clenches against Dominic's scalp.

Too fast. He pulls back, probes the edge of Julien's foreskin with his tongue, suckles more, bobbing his head gently up and down, taking a little more on each pass. He hasn't felt this anxiety for _more_ in what feels like years, this need for Julien to ram his hard, hot, bitter-salt prick down Dominic's throat.

He breathes deep, listens for Julien's little huffs of breath, slides his hands up, one around the root of Julien's prick, one back to cup his balls, weighs the thud of Julien's pulse in his palm. He finds a rhythm, coordinates with Julien as his hips -- fuck, his _hips_ , how can Dominic be so taken with a man's hips, smooth bone and perfect muscle -- start to pump in slowly increasing thrusts.

Dominic makes a noise around Julien, looks up through his lashes and meets those dark eyes, eyes that look like they're hardening, like flint on stone, sparking with control.

 _Yes_.Lando reaches out an arm to brace his hand against the wall, briefly grateful for Dominic's narrow bed that leaves the wall within arms-reach. Granted, it forces Dominic slightly backward, one of his long-fingered hands splaying behind him on the bed for support, but his other stays curled around the base of Lando's dick, as though to be sure Lando doesn't try to pull back.

Lando doesn't; the thought doesn't even cross his mind. He curls his fingers around the back of Dominic's head and supports the arch of his neck, and he watches Dominic's eyelashes flutter against his cheeks. Lando's hips have picked up a quick, short rhythm, and Dominic is moaning, a low, soft sound that subtly buzzes through Lando's dick, and he's forced to confront the fact that apparently blokes are just better at this, better even than Cate's girls, who are awfully good at most everything.

He has the urge to curse or possibly to pray, and it feels like the most impossible torture-by-pleasure, like he's on fire from mid-thigh to navel, like his balls will burst and he'll die from sheer, blissful immolation triggered by Dominic's unbearable mouth, and it's only a minute or two before he knows he has to stop, _has to_ , or it will be too late.

"Dominic," he murmurs, and Dominic moans deeply, and Lando's thighs tremble warningly. He shifts his hips backward, away, and Dominic's fingers dig punishingly into his hip. The sound Dominic makes is unmistakably an objection in spite of being muffled around Lando's dick. "Stop, attente, Dominic," Lando manages, his thighs so tense they nearly ache now, and he twines his fingers into Dominic's hair and pulls firmly. It takes several seconds, but Dominic eventually releases him, gulping in air like he starving for it. His eyes are dark and resentful as they cut up to Lando's face; Lando can't quite stop a smirk.

Dominic's expressive eyes narrow slightly, and Lando leans down and kisses him -- Dominic makes a soft sound of surprise that almost immediately changes into a pleased moan -- to forestall the objection that's practically radiating from Dominic's tense body.

"Not yet," he whispers, and sets a hand against Dominic's chest to ease him back onto his back on the bed. He levers himself down as well, atop and astride Dominic, and doesn't stop kissing him except to murmur, "I'm not finished, I want more than that."

"Yeah," Dominic murmurs back, his tongue flicking out across Lando's lips, and arches upward, body deeply bowed so that his dick is jammed up against Lando's, both trapped between their bellies, and Lando rumbles, wordless and almost mindless, at the heat and friction. "Yeah," Dominic groans again, a long, arcane stretch of syllables.

Lando curls a hand around Dominic's hip and holds him there, trying to breathe past the hazy, pulsing pleasure, and his hand slips on Dominic's sweat slick skin so that he ends up with a handful of Dominic's arse instead. Lando isn't sure whether to be grateful or uncertain as to this development; the low sound of encouragement from Dominic, however, answers that question nicely.

Julien's fingers are so close to where Dominic wants them, so close that Dominic could convince himself that Julien knows what to do next; Dominic grins, tilting his head back against the mattress, because he's sure Julien knows what comes next, how could he not? He's not exactly sexual, but he's tactile, he's visceral. He kissed Dominic with the taste of himself on Dominic’s tongue and Dominic huffs out his breath, shoving his hips up into Julien's; all of that intensity focused on him, it’s almost unreal.

"Can you taste yourself?" he whispers and Julien grunts, jerks against him. Dominic tugs him down and licks into Julien's mouth. "Can you?"

Julien pulls back and looks at him, slides his fingers right between Dominic's arse cheeks and Dominic draws his legs up, slides his thighs over Julien's so he's cradling Julien in the curve between his hips.

"Julien," he says, softly, and breathes slow and deep, "Do you want to fuck me?"

"Oui," Lando murmurs hoarsely. "Yes." He dips in to kiss Dominic again, and Dominic arches again, and there is so much skin and so much heat, and he can still hear Dominic's voice echoing ( _"Can you taste yourself?"_ ) in his ears, sharply depraved thrill of the question, and it's usually his role, _Julien's_ role, to shock and tease, but God, it goes right to Lando's dick, Dominic's slick, smiling lips shaping such words. "I can taste myself on your wicked tongue, Dominic, Dominique, and, yes, I want to fuck you."

He knows how to make his voice low and throaty and he isn't disappointed in Dominic's response, a choked out gasp, the heated slide of that wicked tongue against Lando's jaw, the firm pressure of Dominic's dick pressing hard against his belly, against Lando's dick with unbearable friction, and Dominic's leg sliding up impossibly higher ( _boy is limber_ , Lando thinks a little blearily). Lando's fingertips brush lightly against Dominic's arsehole, and Lando is staring, staring at Dom's face, two inches away and Dominic's lips slide open, pink tongue slick and hissing breath and his eyelids fluff and flutter against his cheeks, and he is beautiful, as beautiful as any girl, and God, Lando _wants_ him.

"If you were a girl, Dominic, I would use my mouth to get you wet, my lips and my tongue." Dominic hisses softly, his brows drawing together in an almost frown, and there is and immense amount of slick fluid between them now that Lando can't quite identify. Sweat and precome, but between the both of him there is good deal more of it than Lando is used to. Enough, he thinks, to get him (them) wet and slick, and he slides a hand between their bodies and swipes it through the slick mess. He lets the side of his thumb traces the underside of Dominic's dick on the way back down, and Dominic makes the most amazing sounds, the most enchanting sounds Lando has ever heard. Lando wants to wait, wants to put his mouth against the hot and silky skin his thumb is tracing, wants to taste and explore, wants to know if it will be as soft against his lips as it feels against his hand, but he can't make himself wait for this. He wants everything, wants it all, but he wants _this_ (his slick fingers press against Dominic's arsehole again, and Dominic rumbles thick encouragement, but if there are words along with sounds, they are too slurred for Lando to make them out) too much to wait, and he can do the rest later.

"You will have to tell me if that is something that I might do with you, for you, sometime," he whispers, and he can hear the unsteadiness of his own voice, and Dominic's brow smoothes out and he moans, absolute and obvious approval as the tip of Lando's index finger slips into Dominic more easily than Lando can believe and he is briefly overwhelmed with how hot Dominic is inside.

"Mon Dieu," he murmurs, closing his eyes and resting his forehead against Dominic's collarbone for a moment, "you feel like you are on fire," and then Dominic's belly tenses (Lando can feel it ripple) and there is abrupt and amazing pressure around Lando's finger as Dominic clenches down on him.

"I am," Dominic rasps back, "I am." He feels Julien's finger crook against the pressure, and he narrows his eyes to slits. "Yes," he hisses, and let's his arsehole convulse around Julien's finger, drawing it in deeper. "Just there-ah! Shite, Christ!" Julien's found it, unerringly; Dominic realizes his eyes are closed, and he snaps them open to see Julien grinning down at him.

"I feel it," Julien says, his voice liquid.

Dominic isn't quite used to even this much preparation, most of the time it's a hurried, hidden moment of him stretching himself. He doesn't remember the last time he watched a man's shoulder rotate in the corner of his view as his wrist turns, another finger enters him swiftly, surely, both rubbing firmly over that spongy spot in him that makes his blood catch fire.

"Perfect," Dominic croons and Julien's smile seems genuine, his fingers move, opening him up. "Imagine this," and he bears down again, letting the muscle flutter open and closed, "around your prick, around your tongue. Imagine tasting yourself not on my," and he bears his teeth, straining up to graze them over Julien's collarbone, "wicked tongue, but inside me."

Julien snarls, and a third finger demands entrance, burning bright and sharp inside him, not quite wet enough. A groan is strangled in Dominic's throat and he knows his eyes are glossy with pain, good, real pain when he opens, looks up at Julien.

"But right now, I want that lovely prick in me." He spits into his palm, loathe to stop to get the jar of oil he keeps in his bed stand, feeling between them for said lovely prick, closing his wet palm around it.

"Now?" Lando demands silkily, grinning and feeling weirdly giddy, almost drunk on the feel of Dominic's hard, callused palm working firmly around Lando's dick. "Right now?"

"Now!" Dominic insists hoarsely, and his hips rock up, his dick slapping against Lando's belly for a moment, slick slide of sweat and heated, silky skin, hard and soft and amazing, and then he pushes himself down and onto Lando's fingers, growling, and Lando (feeling a little stunned, his balls throbbing and tight, his dick bloody _aching_ in Dominic's grip) turns his wrist, adjusts automatically to press his fingertips across the place that makes Dominic's whole body hard, quivering angles. "Now," Dominic whispers, but it's faint this time, pleading more than demanding (though his hand had gone tight and hard around Lando's cock, pleasure so furious it borders on pain), and Lando pulls his fingers free ("ungh," Dominic says, faint objection, and his eyes swirl grey-blue-black, beautiful and looking just resentful enough that Lando can't help but laugh at Dominic's almost-pout) and then pulls his hips back enough to let Dominic guide him.

Dominic is wrigglingly cooperative, and before Lando really knows what's happening, Dominic's legs are hooked up over his shoulders and Dominic is grinning fiercely up at him with sultry, half-lidded eyes, a challenge on his sneering lips.

Lando arches a brow at him and manages to get lined up (he's fairly sure, God, he's bloody shaking, thank God for Dominic's steady hands) and he thinks he probably ought to say something, but Dominic's arsehole is twitching against the head of his dick, and Jesus Christ, how can he be expect to think, so he just pushes, concentrating fiercely on keeping his hips (the want to push, force, _ram_ ) under control.

It's all going very well until he opens his eyes, blinking rapidly to disperse the sting of sweat, and sees Dominic's head tipped back, mouth open, eyes wide and shining and black as pitch, one hand curled around the headboard with knuckles white as salt, and then there is nothing he wants, nothing he needs like he needs to be in, _in_ , inside, and, God, Dominic whines and it is one sharp, fierce thrust, and he sees one of his own hands curl around the headboard next to Dominic's, just as tight, and the tautness of Dominic's body beneath him, the heat and perfect angles of his hipbones and the hard curves of his arse make Lando want to bloody _scream_ , but instead what rolls off his lips is a thready whisper, "Dominic, Dom, ayez besoin de ceci, tu, oui," helpless and reverent.

For a moment, Dominic's vision goes grey on the edges, his whole body bowing up, and his blood roars in his ears. Oh, he tries to say, but all that comes out is a guttural, "Nnnn..." Without lubrication, it feels like Julien has torn him in two; it's been so long since he's done this, but he doesn't remember it _ever_ making him feel like the only thing tethering him to earth is Julien's prick inside him.

Julien is holding himself still, bent low over him, his body filling up Dominic's sight when he blinks to clear away the bright light that's washing over his eyes in waves. "Is it… are you…?" Julien whispers and his eyes are so clear, the lines on his face pulled into worry for _him_ , that Dominic stupidly feels tears sting the backs of his eyes.

Sweat, pain, heat, he calls it and he breathes in, flexing his arsehole, drawing Julien in just that centimetre deeper, so his balls are flush against Dominic's arse and Julien grunts. "It's bloody fantastic," he says and grins, licking salt and saliva off his upper lip. And it _is_ bloody fantastic. It's not perfect, Julien's angle is a little off, his whole body tense as the high wire, but Dominic, romantic that he is, is completely enamoured of all of it.

"If you don't move, though," he breathes and shifts hard, squirms when the head of Julien's prick brushes that place inside him, digging the fingers of one hand into the soft flesh covering the muscles of Julien's hips, "we might have to have words."

"It's not that I don't want to," Lando grinds out from between clenched teeth, feeling his breath huffing out in little hissing pants. He's going for dry -- Julien would be able to pull off dry, even balls deep in the hottest, tightest body imaginable -- but he's pretty sure he just sounds like he's dying, which is fair because that's what it feels like. Not the kind of dying Lando has experience with -- the kind that has to do with blood and infection and a weakened stupor -- though it has feverish heat in common with that sort.

Rather it's the kind of dying that happens when all higher functions flee the mind and the body is strung out and stretched and humming with nerves, and no bloody wonder the French refer to it as la petite mort. He dips his head and runs his tongue along the side of Dominic's neck, tasting salt and feeling the big tendon, tense and shivering under his tongue, and he lapses into French out of habit.

He found out long ago that it's easy to say exactly what you mean if the other person can't understand you.

"Mais tu es si..." he groans, and thinks, _hot_ and _tight_ and _perfect_ , but he doesn't actually finish the sentence at all because Dominic shifts beneath him, his hands on Lando's hips tightening and guiding, and once Lando actually manages to get past the pressure and the heat and the pleasure and the act itself, he can move.

When Dominic throws his head back and groans like he, too, is dying, Lando discovers that not only can he move, but he _has_ to.

"Julien," Dominic hisses, "Julien," and Lando bites down on the almost unbearable urge to correct him.

"Oui, Dominic," he murmurs up against Dominic's mouth, sliding his lips lightly along Dominic's in direct contrast to the hard, steady rhythm of his hips. Dominic bites at Lando's lips, murmuring and gasping, and Lando works a hand between them, vaguely aware that Dominic's dick ought to have some attention even through the low, disruptive thrumming that seems to be the only thing between his ears at the moment.

"Aunngh!" Dominic says, or something similar, and for a moment Lando sees white as Dominic's arse clamps around his dick like a slick, sleekly rippling fist only better, _God, so much bloody better_ ; Dominic is a shivering, hot mass of tense muscle beneath him until his hand curls around Lando's and pulls it away from Dominic's (hardsofthotslippery) dick. "No, no, God," Dominic groans, and his fingers twist around and thread through Lando's and grasp hard. "You can't... don't... Julien." It ends up a groan like a plea, and Lando has no idea what Dominic is trying to say and doesn't care.

"Dom," he breathes, and pulls back slowly, taking a moment just to watch Dominic's face, watch his tongue dart out and moisten his lips, watch the sweat bead at his temple (and Lando leans in, powerless to stop himself, and licks it away), and then surges forward into tightness and heat, and Dominic's head falls back and the wood of the headboard creaks as his hand tightens and he pulls at it.

He wants, Lando wants, and dammit _Lando_ so rarely gets what he wants, and he wants to see Dominic come, he wants to _see_ it and _feel_ it, so he gets his knees beneath him -- he can't quite bring himself to let go of Dominic's hand, their fingers wound together -- so that he can capture Dominic's dick in the hand that he'd been using to support himself.

"Dominique, let me, laisse-moi te toucher, laisse-moi te prendre... laisse-moi t'avoir," and Dominic gazes up at him, both of them momentarily still but thrumming, the calm before the storm, and his eyes are thunderheads. He lets go of the headboard and pushes his fingers into Lando's hair, pulling him down until their lips smash together, and it's close enough to an answer for Lando.

Such a thing for a whore to crave, and it's even better than Dominic had fantasized it to be, his lower lip giving way between their teeth, and the coppery tang of blood flooding his mouth only fires him on. It's the kind of kiss that he was told never to share with a trick, it's the kind of kiss that it supposed to be the one thing you keep for yourself, in the event you're daft enough to fall in love. Dominic strains upward, fucking Julien's mouth the way Julien is fucking him, wet and desperate and shaking. _Don't_ , Dominic thinks, _Don't_ , and he's telling himself and pleading with Julien, but the only sound he makes is a keening that Julien swallows, kissing him back, pressing him back, steadying them both and mimicking the rhythm of Dominic's tongue with his prick and his hand.

Sweat drips in Dominic's eyes and he gasps for air, his fingers slipping against Julien's slick neck, skittering over his back and ribs. "Don't," he says, and it feels like Julien is rearranging his insides to make room for himself. _Hau_ , he wants to say, his tongue itching to use his adopted language, yes, yes, but he holds it in, breathing the shape of it instead against Julien's mouth.

His body and his mind and his prick, having formed a mind of it's own sometimes between meeting Julien and now, are at violent odds, and just the struggle to not speak takes away just that bit of control that he needs to not come, _Don't_ , because Julien's hand, big and sure and work-roughened, feels like Julien's trying to drag Dominic's soul, his _naghí_ , out through his fucking prick. And Dominic wants to give it to him, doesn't he, doesn't that fucking take all; he wants to come first, see his semen on Julien's browned belly, he wants to lick it off, share it between them.

The thought makes his cock jerk, and he screws up all his muscles, clamping down on Julien's prick, making it _burn_ as it enters him. "Please," he whispers, desperately, his body twisting up and his neck arching back so he can't see that gorgeous face about him, "I can't...."

"You can," Lando urges, entranced by Dominic's face. He's almost in control of himself (doesn't think about the feel of Dominic's arse around his dick, slick, hot friction and pressure, because if he thinks about it he'll lose the edges of himself, he can feel it happening, feel himself wanting to dissolve), or enough to resist the twisting, insistent build up of pressure in his balls, the wildly jangling cluster of nerves just beneath his navel, using the knowledge that if he waits, if he just waits a few more moments he can have what he wants, can see Dominic unravel, and God, how he wants that.

It's a little like poker now, a little like containing anything that might give him away, holding himself in abeyance for the moment in which the stakes favor Lando and his restraint will be rewarded.

 _Reward me_ , he thinks, and he says, barely a whisper, "I have been waiting…" and it's true. He has been, though he hadn't exactly known that. And there were offers, other times, other men, there were times when he could have had what he had not been allowed to have with Bills, but he hadn't really been tempted. Not until now. Another casualty of his aborted relationship with a man he'd never been allowed to really know.

But Dominic is different, Dominic is easy to know, easy to want, and there is no need for fear here, now. _I've been waiting for you_ , he thinks, but doesn't say, because there may be no need for fear, but there is always need for caution. What he says instead is, "Don't make me wait," and Dominic shifts and shivers and their lips smash together again, and Lando pushes up further, pressing Dominic's legs up, and Dominic folds accommodatingly beneath him, moving bonelessly, his limbs both lax and tense with pleasure, and the heat baking off of his skin seems unnatural, as though their mingled sweat should sizzle and hiss and evaporate into little puffs of steam.

Dominic's head and shoulders are the only parts of his body touching the bed, Lando has him pulled up and bent nearly double, and this is different than it would be, ever has been, with a woman. There is a kind of reckless, heedless force to it that Lando hadn't ever considered, but which his body seems to already understand is possible, had known from the moment he'd unthinkingly jammed his knee roughly between Dominic's thighs, and Dominic is moaning, his dick jerking and leaking copiously, slicking up Lando's palm, smoothing his strokes, and Dominic's hips are jerking up to meet his, so obviously all right with the force of it that Lando cannot for a moment worry that he's hurting Dominic.

"I..." Dominic says, and Lando knows, sees it in his flushed face and his wide, sleet-colored eyes.

"Yes," Lando hisses and Dominic's back somehow arches, God, somehow bows up so that Lando's dick drives deeply, sweetly into him another fraction of an inch, Lando wouldn't have believed it to be possible. Lando's balls clench, tight knots of need, an agony of pleasure, and he groans in Dominic's mouth as Dominic's breath stops, catches, and his whole body goes taut and hard and quivering beneath Lando. "Goddammit, yes," Lando insists, and doesn't notice the obscenity, which Julien never uses.

He feels the throb against his palm as though his hands have developed hundreds of new and particularly sensitive nerve-endings, feels the swell of Dominic's dick and the pulsing of his release, hot, thick fluid on his hand and his belly and Dominic's belly, and Dominic's stalled breath shudders back into existence with a cry like sob, and his face is deeply red, his brows furrowed as though in pain until his head goes back, snaps back, and he is gasping, "Julien, Julien, oh Christ, please..."

"Beau, s'il te plaît, oui, j'ai besoin... Dominic," Lando breathes, aware that not only is he babbling, but he's babbling in a language Dominic doesn't speak, but the building necessity of his body is apparently inversely proportionate to the ability to control his runaway tongue, and Dominic is so bloody beautiful, so perfect, "... parfait..." and this is like nothing else, impossible and needful, and, "...coup de foudre..."

Lando's voice dies along with his breath (probably a mercy), and there is nothing but the blindingly superb feel of Dominic's body, the sound of him still moaning, tiny, gasping whimpers that seem fundamentally connected with the furiously roiling pit of need in Lando's belly. Then Dominic is touching him, a discordant and entirely separate jangle of pleasure, the hand that had been in Lando's hair just barely sliding between the cheeks of his arse, the faintest pressure, and Lando feels himself flare and flush, hot blood and urgent tension and the unendurable precision of release; he hears himself cry out, not a strangled, sobbing cry like Dominic's, but something louder and sharper, more desperate and demanding, and then he is shuddering and pushing and taking everything Dominic will give him, his face pressed helplessly into the crook of Dominic's neck.

Dominic is almost sobbing, his skin flayed open; Julien is branding him from the inside; Julien's hot, hard prick swells and pulses inside him, butting against that spot that's already swollen with release and it _hurts_. He can feel the spurts of Julien's semen inside him, burning the tender flesh that's been raked raw by Julien's prick. Dominic feels tears sliding down his temples and into his hair. It's bloody brilliant.

Julien bares his teeth against Dominic's neck and Dominic tilts his head, his body loose and pliable and utterly incapable of independent movement. His soft prick shudders and jerks with sympathy, as Julien keeps shoving himself against Dominic's arse; he grunts and finally goes still with one last straining thrust, his breath sighing out of him, hot and humid in the crook of Dominic's neck.

"Julien," he murmurs, and smoothes his hands up Julien's back, shaking, limp legs sliding down to cradle Julien's hips, feet slotting into the backs of Julien's knees. Julien is still shaking, gasping for air. "All right, love?"

His belly does a tumble at the endearment on his own lips; but he figures he's already broken every other rule, why not this last one, when it will soothe Julien, is probably just what he needs to hear. He turns his head and presses his mouth to Julien's temple, gently measuring the length of his knobby spine with his fingertips.

Lando has no idea if he's all right or not, actually. He feels... almost bruised. He lets his lips nuzzle into Dominic's neck and doesn't try to fight the urge to close his eyes and ignore everything but the smell of Dominic's skin, the taste of his sweat on Lando's lips, the steady rise and fall of Dominic's chest beneath Lando's exhausted body.

"Julien," Dominic murmurs again, a faint question. His fingers are making their slow, exploratory way back up Lando's spine; they twist briefly into the short, sweaty hair at the base of Lando's skull, and Lando shivers.

"Oui," he breathes, and forces himself to ease himself back up onto his elbows, levering his weight off of Dominic and sliding to one side. Even so, he leaves one leg hooked over Dominic's thighs, one arm slung across his chest. "I will recover, I have every confidence."

He grins down at Dominic, who grins back, sweaty and flushed and disheveled and utterly gorgeous. Lando looks at him for a long moment, watching Dominic's telling eyes flicker and shift and swirl. There is a very definite shift when Lando tilts his face down, flicking his gaze to Dominic's mouth for a moment. Lando hesitates, watching the uncertain swirl of Dominic's eyes.

Lando thinks he understands. Most of the girls at Cate's will kiss him at the drop of a hat (or a coin or a handkerchief, or merely the drop of the suggestion that he might like to kiss), but there have been others in other cities, other houses.

Yet... Dominic isn't pulling away. He's watching Lando, loose and relaxed, his hand playing lightly over Lando's ribs, and the kind thing to do, the gentlemanly (he smiles faintly) thing, would be to let it go. Put down his cards and get up from the table.

Lando hovers there, undecided, until Dominic's hand curls gently around his hipbone. It isn't the kind of gesture designed to urge him forward or push him away. It's nothing but Dominic wanting to touch, and it sends little prickles of sensation along Lando's skin.

Lando dips his head slowly, resisting the urge to slide his hand up from Dominic's chest to touch his face lest that be interpreted as too intimate but unable to resist the much stronger urge to ghost his lips across Dominic's once, twice, and when he doesn't pull away, to lap softly at the sweet curve of his lower lips.

Julien's breath in his mouth is milky-sour with sweat and whiskey and still Dominic savors it like expensive wine. He sighs back, sharing their breath between them, his arse clenching against the emptiness there, where Julien has carved out a place inside him.

He shifts, rolls Julien onto his back, and leans up, bracing his hands on either side of Julien's head. Julien closes one eye and looks lazily back at him, splaying his long fingers over Dominic's ribs.

Dominic squirms again because he can still feel the ghost of Julien's prick inside, even as Julien's semen is sliding down the insides of his thighs. He's always worn a lambskin, never wanted to feel a trick come inside him, but this is...this is....

He slides down, thrusting his arse into the air, keeping his eyes on Julien, who's smiling a little sleepily, a little confusedly, and Dominic whispers, "Don't want to waste such finery."

"Wha--" Julien starts to say, but it trails off when Dominic laps at the slick smear on Julien's belly, sucks flesh and fur into his mouth, meticulously cleaning every inch of him, belly and navel and the base of his shaft. Julien sucks in his breath when Dominic tongues gently at his soft prick, the heady smell of semen and leather and _himself_ making his heart trip in his chest, making his breath quicken and his spent penis twitch in almost agonizing anticipation.

Julien makes a sound of protest but Dominic licks more firmly, his hands framing his pubic hair and pressing his fingerprints into Julien's skin. "Julien," he murmurs, licks again; he thinks he'll never tire of the shape of Julien's name in his mouth. "Julien."

"Ah, God," Lando breathes, his belly crossed and hitched by bands of heat as he watches Dominic's sandy head dip down, pink tongue laving at Lando's mostly soft dick. "Ah, Christ, that should be illegal!"

Dominic laughs and Lando feels the prick of stubble against his hip and the base of his dick; he thinks it should be unpleasant, painful like a carpet burn, but it isn't. It sends happy, buzzing shivers along his dick and his spine, and he beams down at Dominic who beams ingenuously back up at him.

He shifts downward quickly, angling his body to roll Dominic beneath him. Dominic resists half heartedly, but he's still laughing; Lando can feel the rumble of it beneath the palm of his hand, resting on the smooth expanse of Dominic's chest. There is a small, soft patch of light hair just under Dominic's navel, dampened as Lando's had been with jizz and sweat, and it doesn't occur to Lando that he might not like the taste.

He's tasted his own and found it bitter but not repulsive, and had always assumed it all tasted alike. He was wrong.

Dominic's come tastes flatly metallic, like sucking on a penny, with an edge of salt which might belong to it or to the sweat on Dominic's belly. The muscles beneath Lando's tongue tighten and shiver, and the slight heat in Lando's belly, dampened and sated, begins to burn again. When he glances upward, Dominic is watching him through eyes narrowed to slits, his breathing slipping softly through slick, parted lips.

"That's..." he says, "that's..." and Lando smiles and nods, because he understands exactly what that is, since he watched Dominic do it two minutes before. And he guesses Dominic's tricks don't much do things like this.

He eases up Dominic's body and slides an arm beneath Dominic's back. He eases up to let Lando's arm under him, and then hesitates for a moment before sinking down, his chest pressed to Lando's side. There is another instant of hesitation, and then he lays his head softly on Lando's shoulder.

"Alas," Lando says, resting his chin on top of Dom's mussed hair, which smells of sunshine and soap and sweat, "I am spent." He isn't, not quite, but he could use a breather, definitely. What he wants, though, is to lie here next to Dominic and smell him, watch him, and he can feign the need for rest if he has to in order to get that opportunity. "You were too much for me, I fear, and now I shall die."

"Isn't that what your people call just a little death?" Dominic laughs and Julien snorts, letting his hand drift lightly over Dominic's back once, before settling firmly on his shoulder. Dominic can hear Julien's heartbeat, slowing to something more normal, steady and strong. He shivers a little, remembering feeling his thready pulse just a week ago.

"Cold?" Julien asks and Dominic shakes his head against Julien's shoulder.

"Tired," he says, "Fucking worn out." He tilts his head up to look at the curve of Julien's cheek from the corner of his eye. "Strapping lad like you's no match for me."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Dominique." Julien's voice is lazy but alert and Dominic had thought about this before, that Julien was most likely not much for the afterglow, and would want to hastily, but gracefully of course, make his exit.

"Mmm," Dominic murmurs and lets his eyes flutter closed, breathing in deeply and letting it out slowly.

The silence stretches and Julien doesn't move. Dominic feels himself actually starting to doze, his body shutting down. And Dominic is a bit of a hedonist, he likes to do as his body dictates, he likes to sleep and lounge and eat and fuck. And with his body tugging him gently into sleep, he really has no desire to fight it; he thinks for once, it would be a nice change to actually sleep with someone at his side, to be able to trust the man in his bed enough to let him leave at his discretion. And it would save any awkwardness, too, this being Julien's first time, and they'll be able to maintain their tenuous friendship outside of the bedroom.

He stretches once, luxuriously, against Julien's side and as he settles, he feels himself sliding down, into the bed, mingling with the heat of Julien's skin, and everything starts to slip slowly away, the scent of sex and Julien -- nearly the same thing in his head now -- lulling him into a lovely doze.

After a time, Dominic goes soft and lax against his side.

Lando doesn't feel remotely tired himself.

He feels energized, alert, almost elated.

It's ridiculous, of course. It's only sex, and paid sex, at that. It's only sex.

He turns his head and looks at Dominic. The curve of his cheek is inches away, the hollow beneath his cheekbone deepened by shadow. His breath is slow and even, and flutters warmly across Lando's chest. Dominic's eyelashes cast long, spiky shadows across his cheek.

Letting his gaze wander downward, he can see the firm, curved muscle of Dominic's upper arm and the angle of his hipbone, the curve of his arse, the long, muscular length of his thigh, which is resting heavily atop Lando's thigh. Dominic's knee is just brushing against the smallish bandage on Lando's other thigh, which, he's is amused but unsurprised to realize, hasn't bothered him since much earlier in the night. It's throbbing a bit now, doubtless protesting all the exertion, but it's a manageable pain. The easy, relaxed let down of having Dominic doze off in his arms probably hadn't hurt it any, either.

The rest of Dominic is still pretty much a mystery. Lando had seen him -- Hell yeah he had, more than just seen him -- but he hadn't had the time or the presence of mind to really look.

A glance up at Dominic's face shows him apparently sleeping, his eyes flickering behind closed lids, lashes fluttering slightly. He doesn't wake when Lando eases his arm from underneath Dominic's back, pushing slightly so that Dominic is splayed on his back in the middle of the narrow bed, his limbs akimbo.

He takes his time looking.

With Dominic asleep, he has nothing but time, as it's probably a bad idea to fall asleep himself. Perchance to dream, and all that.

So he looks for long, languid minutes, at the bend of Dominic's knee, the light colored fur on his legs and under his arms, the darker colored fur of his pubic hair. He observes the slow rise and fall of Dominic's chest, broader than it appears when he's dressed, browned by the sun (though not as deeply as Lando's), the small, dark nipples, the visible ridges of his ribcage. He regards Dominic's long, piano-player fingers and thick, corded neck with as much attention as the indented crescent of his navel and the slim angles of his hips.

It is a collarbone that first tempts him to touch, angular and shadowed, and he does so carefully, just the tips of his fingers resting lightly on Dominic's warm skin. It's smooth, which he had known, but hadn't got the chance to really appreciate earlier. He'd had other things on his mind.

He takes the time to appreciate it now, his palm flat against Dominic's skin, stroking in long, unhurried sweeps from collarbone to belly.

Lando touches the hollow of Dominic's throat, and the taut skin of his belly, and the crisp-yet-soft hair sprinkled across Dominic's thighs, and he barely notices he's slithered down the bed so that he can reach the tender skin at the bends of Dominic's knees and the thick muscles of his calves and the smooth, curving arch of his foot, and each part of him is perfectly made and good to touch, and it occurs to Lando that things like the soft plane of skin beneath Dominic's belly button and the soft, pristine skin on the inside of his forearm and the slightly damp crease where Dominic's balls rest against his thigh are beyond merely beautiful.

They're like secrets. He wonders if any of Dominic's lovers (customers?) ever take the time to really explore his secrets.

Dominic wakes slowly, a delicious, almost-anxiety tugging in his belly, something that could be the breeze or perhaps a stray spider or beetle flutters over his thigh, radiating tiny needles of pleasure up his legs and into his chest. He sighs deeply, pulling his arms up above his head and twisting his head into the crook of his elbow. Deeper sleep beckons. His body curls into itself, pulling away from the tickle across his skin.

It's only his few years of experience in avoiding trouble with his tricks that he doesn't startle when the mattress under him shifts, and he slides into the depression, into the warm body whose weight undulates the mattress again, eases him onto his side.

Those fingers can only be Julien, softly spider-walking across his nape, thumbing at the crease of his armpit. Dominic forces himself to keep breathing evenly, even though his heart staggers, makes his lungs burn with the need for huge whoops of breath to replace what Julien's unknowingly taken away.

Julien's fingers stroke over his ribs, down the slope of his belly and hip. Cool breath gusts over the path he's just traced; Dominic can feel the gooseflesh rise in its wake, and the touch comes again, mapping the line of pleasure over his belly, up his chest. His nipples pucker and Julien must know, he must know Dominic's awake.

But he doesn't want to break whatever spell Julien's woven over the bed, and he lets his head loll on the pillow, relaxing each muscle as Julien traces toward it. This is what he can do, maybe, for Julien; this is what he can really give him. Bugger it if he knows, Dominic suspects with Julien, it's not about the knowledge, it's what you do with it.

He hums softly, involuntarily, deep in his chest, and he gives into the urge to let a grin curl his lips. Let Julien see it. Let him see that Dominic is pliant and sleepy and unguarded, let Julien see that he's fucking loving every minute, every bloody second of his fingers, his breath, his knees tucked up behind Dominic's.

Could be bloody dangerous, he knows, because Julien could become his favorite customer. A slender, knobby thumb follows along the sensitive scar tissue on his shoulder blade that curves all the way up and peeks over his throat, where he'd got tangled in the razor wire around the railway construction site when he was 10, one of his most vivid memories of Manchester. He finds he wants to turn over and tell Julien about it, about the last time he'd seen Ciaran, his father's oldest brother and his favorite uncle, and his brother's hand over his mouth, holding the bit of hardened leather between his teeth as his mother pulled coarse thread through his skin, pulling the wound closed.

Instead, he lets the urge drift away as Julien's fingers continue on, smoothing down his spine, and he revels in the urge itself, because he hadn't thought about that day without pain in years.

Maybe Julien can give him something, too. A danger. Dominic breathes deep and slow and can't ease the smile from his face. What's life without a little danger?

 


	6. Waltz: Cate, Lando, Yuma, November, 1878

This is the idle time, mid afternoon, when everyone's up but there's still hours before the house is open for business. Some of the girls are wearing simple afternoon dresses of print muslin, some are in their nightgowns, and some in a hybrid state of stockings and evening shoes peeking out from under their wrappers.

Dominic, in shirtsleeves and unshaven, is sitting at the piano in the front parlor, his slim hands shaping music with effortless skill. He's laughing, as if surprised and delighted by the rapid lilt of the waltz melody he's playing.

Cate's laughing too, her head tipped back under the weight of her already elaborately dressed hair. She and Liv – Cate's still in her afternoon dress, and Liv's in her corset and drawers under a silk peignoir, with her hair loose down her back – are whirling around the room in each other's arms.

Cate's a strong lead and Liv's a supple and trusting follower. They sweep past the other girls, sprawled on the couches and perched on the bar, who laugh and clap with pleasure. Dom glances over his shoulder and grins, and Cate arches an eyebrow in lofty acknowledgement.

Lando is standing in the doorway, perfectly shaved and combed and dressed in Julien's finery, his only concession to the general air of deshabille being the lack of a vest and coat. He may not know the dance -- he's never actually been in a position to _see_ a waltz, as Julien's unspoken claim to aristocracy is an illusion, and Lando himself was solidly raised in ranch country, not a place to which waltzing comes naturally -- but he knows about grace and exertion, and Cate and Liv are exhibiting both at the moment. It's clearly structured; Lando can see it in the line of Cate's shoulders, carefully parallel to the floor, the strict, disciplined turns of her slim body, the way she holds her head. It's nothing like the dances Lando had grown up with, the sort where you partnered only loosely with a girl but were in truth dancing in fours or in lines even longer than that.

This is close, though not quite touching for the most part, and there is something urgent and vital in the steps, a sensual, almost frenetic tension underlying the measured movements.

Though Cate and Liv aren't _that_ close, there is heat and intimacy that Lando can't help but follow minutely with his eyes, his mind ticking over the steps, the gestures, the postioning as they turn, their hips nearly touching for a moment, side to side, with outstretched arms and sharply turned heads. He knows before it's even half done that _Julien_ would know how to waltz, even if he doesn't have much of a chance to use it of late, and that when he did waltz, he would be ruthlessly, scorchingly proficient at it.

Dom finishes the tune with a flourish, and Cate spins Liv away. Liv sinks into a curtsy, her silk-stockinged knees emerging from between the fronts of her robe. Cate bows gallantly.

Lando applauds appreciatively.

"Oh my God," Jewel squeals from her vantage point on the bar. "Julien. Make Julien waltz."

Dom ruffles his fingers over the keys and presses out a chord. Cate, turns, her eyes shining with utter pleasure, and extends her hand to him.

"You may even lead if you wish, monsieur," she says archly.

"Alas," Lando says. "I fear I am not yet well enough to do justice to such a partner. Excusez-moi."

Cate smiles and shrugs, and the moment is passed off when Dom strikes up a polka, and several of the girls scramble into the center of the floor and start to spin each other around with a great deal more energy and less elegance than the last dancers displayed.

Lando goes out onto the side porch. He's not remotely surprised when Cate comes out a moment or two later.

"You don't know how, do you?" she says very quietly.

"It never came up before," Lando says, turning around. "Not much call for waltzing around here."

Cate's eyes are glittery with mischief.

"Well, you've been caught out once. Lord knows who might ask next time – Harry Sinclair, or the sheriff."

He makes a show of considering it for long, deliberate moments, and then nods solemnly. "You're right, of course, mon couer," he says, and manages to capture her hand in his. When she doesn't pull it away, he raises to his lips and kisses her knuckles lingeringly, one, two, three, four, resisting the urge to involve his tongue in the gesture.

"How could I be so foolish and unwary as to neglect such an important aspect of my façade?" he murmurs, lips brushing against the back of Cate's hand. "Whatever would I do if Sheriff Bean asked me to waltz?"

He makes his tone utterly and completely serious, heavy with foreboding, and Cate nods her solemn agreement, though the corners of her lips are twitching.

"It's a serious flaw," she says, and still doesn't pull her hand away from his lips.

"Indeed, you are right. That I could be so easily caught out is utterly insupportable."

He flicks his eyes up to hers, glittery with amusement and other things they never talk about. He brushes his lips across the back of her hand, then turns her fingers in his to brush his lips against the heel of her palm and then the silky heat of the inside of her wrist; she allows it. They're in public, after all, and she can pass it off to herself (and to him, if he should ask, though of course he won't, he knows better) as another facet of _their_ façade, treat it as meaningless, though he can feel the flutter of her pulse against his lips. "I beg you to help me rectify this most grievous oversight," he says, and grins at her with teeth bared and one brow arched, releasing her hand because he knows better than to push her.

She flares hot for him occasionally, and he can't quite keep himself from taking advantage (in the most innocent fashion, unfortunately) of this when it happens, but if he pushes her, she'll go icy and cool on him for days or even weeks.

"Cate," he says, and steps back to bow deeply, rising with a flourish. "Mon couer, mon chéri, will you teach me to waltz?"

Cate's caught in a potentially dangerous place, and she knows it.

Waltzing with Liv – who's oddly like Cate, in culture and experience, having grown up in the same cities, aping the social graces that Cate learnt for real – is breathless fun. A chance – so rare for a woman of Cate's class – to _move_ , to feel her body quick and strong, to have her heart pound and her breath squeeze in her corset and just be _happy_. Cate forgets that there's a reason she and Liv are the only ones in the house who know this dance. It belongs to the rich, and the risqué.

Lando has never told Cate anything about his upbringing, any more than she has told him about hers. But Cate's an astute observer, and a fine discriminator of manners. Lando's people, she's sure, are drawn from the solidly educated and cleanly mannered small gentry of England. Landowners, in a modest way, with enough natural authority that Lando can assume Julien's aristocratic hauteur without seeming offensively arrogant. But he is not, she would stake her life, part of the dilettante upper classes to whom waltzing is an acceptable indulgence.

There's a reason this dance is still denounced from the pulpits of churches as inflammatory.

On the other hand, Julien really would know how to waltz. And, while there's really very little danger of the Sheriff offering Lando his arm, the girls in the house have now been alerted to the possibility of Julien twirling Cate around the front parlor. They won't rest until they see it, and Lando can only plead his injured leg for so long.

"Come upstairs," Cate says. "I'll teach you the steps, and when you're sure, we can come down here and practice. You can blame your injury if you misstep."

They go up to Cate's sitting room, and Lando pushes back the armchair and moves the small side table, giving them as much space as possible. Cate stands in the middle of the floor, her hands folded primly in front of her, and her gaze dropped modestly.

Lando comes to stand in front of her.

"I'm ready for my lesson," he says, and Cate can't help flicking him a glance of amusement and warning.

She's beginning to realize what she's just gotten herself into.

"Come closer," she says, and dear God there's a heat in her cheeks that she sincerely hopes isn't a blush.

Lando steps in until he's practically pressed against the dress drapery that hangs across her hips.

"Not that close," Cate says coolly, putting one hand on his chest to guide him back a half step.

Lando's expression is all dutiful student, but his eyes are sparkling like jet with sheer badness.

Cate's pink cheeks and bright eyes are enough to make him want to give her a demonstration of his talents at mimicry that she won't forget, and wisdom be damned. He's certain enough that she understands, intellectually, that he can do what he can do, _be_ what he is, because he is naturally a quick study, adept at watching a thing a time or two and then emulating it flawlessly with only a small amount of hands-on application, but knowing a thing and seeing it in action are two separate things. He remembers even Billy's eyes widening on occasion, like the first time Lando had done a card trick for him, the first time Lando had shot, juggled, thrown a knife.

It's a talent Lando plays close to the vest for the most part, but it's only Cate, and he's safe enough here, and everyone occasionally likes to _shine_.

He knows where and how to stand from watching Cate dance with Liv, knows what's expected of him as the man from watching Cate's firm, confident demonstration of what it means to lead, but he lets Cate curl her cool fingers around his hand anyway, guiding it to her waist. He flexes his fingers against the stiff fabric of her gown, feeling the boning of her corset beneath, and tilts his head slightly in question when she lets her free hand curve down towards her skirt. Their free hands link rather naturally, and Lando gives her a slight smirk, and a murmured, "Scandalous."

She gives him a stern look that is completely undone by the bright gleam of her eyes, and murmurs back, "Pay attention, you âne insupportable."

He grins and nods his approval. "Very good, Cate, but drop 'you' -- the French do not curse like that. You'll be cursing like a native before long; le plus impressionnant." The pink on her cheeks increases fractionally, and Lando finds that his eyes are loathe to leave the color on her cheeks. "Do we not need music, mon couer?" he asks softly, mostly to cover the fact that he's entranced.

"No, I'll count the beats out until you know what you're doing," Cate says coolly, because nothing makes it easier to control herself than Lando inviting her with every glint of eye and teeth not to.

His lips quirk, a perfect combination of chastened and defiant.

"Will you let me lead at first?" she says.

"Anywhere," he answers, and she can't help it, the laugh bubbles up and out before she can catch it.

"If we were doing this properly," she says, "I'd have a fan which I'd give you sharp rap on the knuckles with at this point."

"Skip that part," Lando says. "We're not doing it properly. We're doing it improperly."

Cate refuses to even grace that with a response.

"All right. We're going this way,"

she tilts her head over her right shoulder,

"that's a natural turn, as opposed to a reverse turn. You're going to start from your left foot, going to your right."

Lando makes a noise indicative of complete confusion, but Cate knows he could repeat that back to her verbatim, and deduce the rules if she suggested the opposite direction.

"We're stepping out a shape that's like a triangle that never quite closes," Cate explains. "So it's on three beats. One,"

she steps, and Lando's weight comes with her, only the faintest hesitation as he waits to see how far she's moving,

"two,"

"three,"

"again,"

he's serious now, all the banter forgotten while he actually spends a minute or two absorbing her expertise.

"Don't lift your feet, keep them close to the floor," Cate says.

It's not just a matter of the steps, Cate sees. There are nuances of movement – how he tilts his chin into the turn as they complete one round and begin the next, how he presses his shoulders back – that she expected to have to teach with patient care. She realizes he's mimicking her, but not as she is now, when she's ostensibly leading their steps but her arms are in the attitude of the follower – one hand relaxed in his, the other superfluously managing the modest skirts of her afternoon gown in lieu of an evening train. He's copying what she was when she danced with Liv.

There's a subtle shift of emphasis between them, and Cate's following, letting him determine the sweep and circle of their steps around the room.

He judges his progress at first by the need to count the steps. After a handful of revolutions around Cate's sitting room -- which is smaller than the area they really need for this particular dance, he understands -- his body picks up the rhythm and can dismiss it from his mind. He concentrates next on the smaller things, the direction he should be facing, keeping his shoulders set parallel to the floor, the small intricacies he'd watched Cate practice, and the position of his feet barely registers.

When she relinquishes the lead he takes it gladly, guiding her around the floor with great care for long moments, and then relaxing even as his heart speeds up in his chest. This is, he can tell, going to end up being quite a bit of exertion.

Cate's steps are in opposition to his, he notes, and the rotation is repetition for the most part, though the movements are a bit staggered, not quite equal.

Once he feels certain that he's got the hang of it, he smiles at her -- she is, he notes, as flushed as he feels, her color high and her eyes gleaming, and her slender throat shimmers with dampness that would undoubtedly taste of salt, were he to touch his tongue to the hollow of her throat or the barely exposed angle of a collarbone -- and says, "There must be a thing, un tour, for getting out of the way of oncoming waltzers, oui?" He sounds breathless even to his own ears; inexplicably, it makes him grin.

"Precisely," Cate says, and there's fierce pleasure in seeing him like this, the layers shifting and merging and yet showing nothing more than they ever do. "It's like this, same first and second, then don't step away on the third, just bring your foot in to count the beat, then off again. See?"

They try a couple of times slowly, Lando uncertain for the first one, then seeing how dropping a single step leaves them offset by a third of a turn.

"Is that generally enough to avert disaster?" he asks, when he's got the maneuver down so perfectly that Cate hardly notices it when he turns them several times in rapid succession. She can tell it's coming by the slight press of his hand on her waist, and she wonders if he is such an acute observer that he could see her communicate with Liv in this fashion, or if he's simply intelligent enough to deduce that some such convention must exist in order for the lady not be caught wrong-footed when her partner makes the turn. Either way, Cate feels a flare of pride in him.

"Generally, but if it's not, that's your problem, not mine," Cate says sweetly.

Lando flashes her a wicked look, lets her know there's a turn, and this time back steps enough to make a sharper angle. Cate gasps, but she's been boneless enough in his grip to just go with him and they sweep away again stylishly.

"Don't forget, too," Cate says, "you're used to doing this in a ballroom, not a whorehouse. You give way to those who go into dinner ahead of you, no one else."

"Naturellement," Lando murmurs, and he lifts his chin just a fraction higher and his brow arches in aristocratic disdain.

"And make this arm strong," Cate says, flexing her fingers in his hand.

He looks questioningly at her.

"I'll be managing a train," Cate says by way of explanation. "It's good manners for you to help with the weight as much as possible."

He nods, and Cate feels the tension spring in his arm, and she lets hand her lie more confidingly in his. He's perfect now, the quirk of his eyebrow and his slight smile and the way his gaze drifts off in serene abstraction all speaking eloquently of familiarity and fluency. Even the too-small space of the sitting room doesn't matter, because the tilt of his spine and the turn of his head convey how expansive and dizzying he could make this for her in the right setting.

Cate stops taking steadying glances past his shoulder, and instead lets her gaze linger on the shining curl describing an arabesque around the lobe of his ear. The whirl of the dance becomes weighty, and she can feel herself losing some fundamental connection to the world. This was Cate's guilty pleasure as a girl, to waltz so recklessly, to abandon her balance to her partner. Lando's breathing hard, a nasal exhalation on every other alternate step, and Cate can feel the heat of his body radiating through the fine cloth of his shirt. Lacking a train, Cate has no reason to extend her free hand away from her side, and it drifts down among the folds of her skirt until her arm is pressing against his hand where it curves on her waist.

And then the rhythm between them comes undone and they fall away, Lando holding his ribs.

"That's hard work," he laughs.

Cate, now that she's no longer swept along, realizes her chest is aching for want of air.

"Oh God," she gasps, grinning. "I used to do that for hours, all night sometimes. I'd hardly go in to supper, if it meant missing a waltz."

The image of Cate, young and laughing and breathless from dancing, is extraordinarily vivid in his mind's eye, and he grins at her, one arm snaking out to pull her into his arms in a far closer manner than even the waltz allows proper, spinning her around until she lets out a little shriek and he dissolves into laughter and sets her firmly on her feet.

"Thank you, ma chere, for the lesson." He sweeps into a polished bow, a precise replica of the one Cate had given Liv, and Cate, laughing, curtsies deeply.

"Mon plaisir, monsieur," Cate allows, her accent spot on, her voice rich and capable with the language, and Lando's surprised at the little frission of pleasure that Cate speaking French in such a liquid, practiced manner gives him.

This must be what makes Julien so popular with the ladies, he thinks absently, but his attention is on Cate, her flushed cheeks and bright smile and it's nice to have her so relaxed and happy.

"Sunshine," he says, more just to say it than to get her attention, but he's certainly not going to complain that she turns toward him, her face going a bit softer, and she reaches for him and touches her fingertips to the back of his hand, an innocent gesture that nevertheless sparks a warm coil of desire in Lando's belly. "I missed you," he says, which is completely true, though he had spent enough time running for his life that he hadn't had that much _time_ to miss anyone. What time he'd had, though, he had spent missing Cate, missing Yuma.

She dips her head slightly, and he thinks her flush deepens slightly. He finds himself stepping smoothly forward, and he _could_ stop himself -- he has before -- but he chooses not to. Her eyes fly up to his face, wide and startled, and he leans slightly, broadcasting his intentions clearly for her to see, both curious and a little nervous to see what she does with that information.

Cate feels the moment tipping, and she knows she needs to pull back, but her body is still heavy and warm with the exertion of the waltz, and still pliant with following. Something expands, tingling red, inside her chest. The best Cate can do is close her eyes.

She can feel his breath ruffle on her lips.

So easy. So easy to do nothing, to let it happen.

He leans in a fraction further, and the click of his lips parting is a whip-crack sound in the shimmering silence between them. The darkness behind Cate's eyelids spangles red and gold.

His breath scorches against her skin, tawny with the smell of sweet-leaf tobacco. The oil in his hair smells of sandalwood. Cate's breath comes as unevenly as when she was dancing, and her heart is still lilting out that dizzying rhythm.

His fingers brush against her waist, in the sweet spot between corset bones where she can feel the touch through a few layers of fabric. And the touch, the subtlety of it coming before he's claimed the kiss he so clearly desires, and the knowingness of its placement, make her guts twist and pang with want. He's exquisite, he's accomplished … she knows all this, from the giggles and blushes and wheedling flirtation he excites in the girls. Why shouldn't Cate know too? Why shouldn't Cate also have

 _Julien_

Lando leans the last particle of distance, and Cate gasps, her eyes flying wide and there's a searing instant when his lips graze hers and then she's twisting away, not violently but insistently.

Lando startles, and reaches for her, but his expression is more dismayed than displeased.

"No," Cate says sharply, backing until some piece of furniture fixes her at bay.

Julien … or Lando … or whoever else he can be, that she has seen as bits of dirty clothing stuffed into Julien's elegant saddlebags, as a faint unevenness in the tan on Julien's clean-shaven jaw. Cate doesn't know who he is, and that doesn't matter, here. But if they cross that threshold …

she won't know who he is, and so she won't know who to be. Cate, who's a whore, or … Ellen. Who's scared.

Lando closes the space between them again, but he doesn't try to touch her, just stands in front of her, so close that she can feel the heat of his body.

"Don't," she says so softly. "It makes a man seem lower-class if he thinks a waltz means anything. It's more elegant to behave as if you're just bored."

For long moments, he says nothing. His lips are burning where they'd grazed Cate's (and her mouth had been soft and sweet for that single instant), and his trousers are nearly unbearably snug against his groin, the warmth tightening his belly just on the good side of painful.

There is an equal tightness in his chest, and that one is wholly painful, nothing good about it, and he remembers too late the folly of giving another person the power to hurt you. Though, Cate, if he's honest, has had that power for a long time. They've simply never been in a situation in which she could or would exercise it.

And tangled up with both, winding through and around and within it, but separate, there is a cool, hard knot of anger. She didn't push him, it's true, but it's too much like the past, smacks too bitterly of Bills, being kissed and dismissed, and he can't quite stop himself from applying the bitterness of one to the other.

The difference is, he's another man entirely than the boy that Bills had pushed away, and words as knives come easily, naturally to him, sometimes unforgivably so.

He bites down on them now, struggling to push his mind into the pattern of thought that will let him recognize that _her_ words hadn't been meant as an attack. He is by no means sure of this, in fact, but it's better for both of them if he assumes that it's true.

In the end, he makes a soft, deep-throated sound that causes Cate too look up, meet his eyes done for that very purpose -- and he captures her that way, without touching her.

"Be assured," he says, low and careful and inflectionless, "that I will keep that advice firmly in mind in the future, Cate. But this has never had anything to do with a waltz."

Cate hangs her head, as much in shame as to hide her eyes from his. Sometimes she can manage a sliver of annoyance that she's forced periodically to restate the boundaries between them. But it's no more rational than resenting the grass for growing. For all that he's done, and Cate knows that no matter how bad she thinks that is, it's probably worse in reality, Lando still reaches towards life and love as unconsciously as a plant grows toward light.

"I know that," Cate whispers, and the words are so quiet they scarcely disturb the air.

But when she glances up she sees him smile, the gesture sad and sweet, and he leans in.

And Cate closes her eyes again, and this time he doesn't hesitate, but puts his lips to her cheek. The contact is dry and warm, and Cate feels something jagged turn over in her chest and she resists the urge to turn her face, to catch his mouth with her own and let them find out who they are by shaping their names on each other's bodies with hands and lips.

Lando pulls back, and Cate lets her eyes flicker open again.

He bows, not Julien's elaborate and somehow subtly mocking gesture, but the perfectly simple graceful gesture of a bred-in-the-bone English gentleman, and Cate smiles.

"I'll send Liv up to help you dress," he says, and Cate's gaze skitters away again.

This is how scrupulously he guards her. Most evenings he unbuttons and buttons her either with the indifference of a distracted spouse, or with teasing innuendo that's somehow even less intimate than his silence. And sometimes, with no warning, he'll leave when it's time for her to dress or undress, and send her Liv to serve in his place. Cate trusts him, not because he never falters, but because he falters and never falls.

"Thank you," Cate says, as he moves away. "And – Lando."

He stops, turning his head but not turning around, not actually looking at her.

"Liv waltzes very well," Cate says gently. "I imagine she's make a good partner, if you … wanted to practice. Since your leg's almost better, I mean. She wouldn't mind if you weren't quite as adept as you normally are."

Lando nods, and he turns enough to flash a quick smile, and then he's gone.

And Cate's left with the after-burn in her lungs, and the liquid tiredness in her thighs, and the blood humming in her lips. And really, nothing's changed about waltzing since she was seventeen.


	7. Caught: Lando, Elijah, Yuma, 1878

Even without the smell, the man would be a hardship to sit across from.

Elijah wrinkles his nose behind his handful of cards and hopes that it passes for bad bluffing or no bluffing at all. He doesn’t care; he’s nearly got a full boat, eights over ladies if he cheats, and the table is occupied by men who shouldn’t even have bothered sitting down. Especially the rather large specimen to his right whose meaty paw, when it’s not occupied with cards or a drink, has been fondling Elijah’s thigh for far too long. If it weren’t for the money piling up nicely in front of him, Elijah would’ve either planted a solid one between the creep’s eyes or walked out with a few choice barbs that would be disquieting.

Harry’s warm, spotless sheets almost sound like a better deal at this point. Almost, not quite. With this hand he should make enough not to have to keep going. He’s not a good card player, but he’s absolutely the best at cheating. He almost wishes for more cunning victims.

When the two men across from him shift in their chairs, Elijah looks up and grins childishly, letting his thighs fall open for the thick fingers inching their way into his lap again.

“Bets are off, kid. We paid to see it, give us your hand.”

He does, wide eyes going a little sharper with his grin.

Lando knows the large and very smelly man on Elijah's right -- well, knows of him, anyhow. He's a braggart and a liar, and he seems to be groping Elijah under the table, which might explain the card that had come out of Elijah's sleeve, although it's unlikely to excuse it. Lando hadn't seen either of the others cheating, and if Elijah doesn't want Mojo's hand on his thigh, he might at least have the decency to ask him to remove it at least once before resorting to cheating as a means of revenge (if that is, in fact, why he's doing it).

The boy is fairly adept at it, but Lando doesn't like the look buried in Mojo's eyes. It's the sort of look that seems too content with life, too pleased; as though he'll be getting what he wants no matter how the next few minutes play out.

He sees it flicker across Mojo's face a little more clearly as Elijah lays out his cards with a grin (the man on Mojo's right is looking at Mojo, not Elijah's cards at all, and Lando is fairly sure he's a lackey of some sort). Apparently, even idiots get lackeys in this town (how quaint). They should put up a sign: "Visit Yuma, get a lackey of your very own!" Then Mojo's face goes blank and his eyes go narrow.

At first Elijah mistakes the harsh, dark glitter in the big man's eyes for simple sour grapes, the thunderous beginnings of rage at losing a not-insubstantial amount of money to Elijah's full house. He's seen enough of that before in the short time he's been playing, of men who play with what they can't afford to lose; a common enough thing that Elijah has learned this could go very badly, and his grin sticks just a little, as if he were regarding a dog that may just decide to bite.

The man pauses, however, his eyes lingering on the cards, and when he speaks it's slow and heavily sweet, not at all like a snarling dog, and his words churn cold through Elijah's stomach.

"Well, now," the man says, one thick finger reaching across to touch the cards, spreading them further apart and stopping on the Queen of diamonds. "What have we here?" He taps on the card for emphasis, unnecessary since it seems to Elijah that the room has gone quieter than the inside of a tomb, the only sound the heavy _tap, tap, tap_ of the man's dirty fingernail on the shiny paper lady.

"It's a Queen," Elijah observes dryly, his smart-aleck mouth getting a bit ahead of the part of his brain that's telling him this _isn't_ the time for it, and he struggles to control the rabbiting of his pulse.

"The Queen of diamonds, more like," the man says, and now he looks up from the card to fix Elijah with his flat stare. "Funny how that could be, since I"-- Elijah watches the man's finger slide away from the card to his own hand, spread face-down on the table-- "happen to have that same little lady right _here_." He flips a card over, and the real Queen smiles up at Elijah, her expression somehow coy, almost _you're fucked_ , noted with a certain amount of glee.

 _Bugger_ , Lando thinks sourly, but not without some amusement. Elijah looks like he's swallowed a bug, his big eyes even wider than usual, twin blooms of color burning high up on his cheeks. It's somewhat gratifying to watch him flounder.

Lando is opposed to cheating as a rule, and this isn't the first time he's watched Elijah do it, though it's the first time he's seen Elijah get caught. He's even tried to mention it to Elijah a couple of times, albeit obliquely, but Elijah is unnervingly good at looking innocently oblivious. He's tempted to just let Elijah handle it on his own. It's what Billy would've done, Lando's sure. Billy was a firm believer in getting yourself out of anything you manage to get yourself into.

But Elijah appears to be frozen like a deer surprised by a hunter, and Mojo picks up both queens, turning them over and over in his hands. "How do you suppose that happened?" he asks, his voice low and as silky as he seems capable of making it (which, in Lando's opinion, is a miserable failure).

Elijah glances at Mojo's lackey, his eyes a nervous skitter, and then back to Mojo.

"It seems," Mojo says, his lips curling into a thoroughly unpleasant smile, "that we've got a little _cheat_ on our hands, Dave."

Mojo's hand drops into Elijah's lap again, and this time Lando sees his knuckles go white and his fingertips dig into Elijah's thigh. Elijah's face goes very white and strained all at once.

Lando sighs, momentarily grateful that he already dislikes Mojo, otherwise he'd feel faintly bad about what he's going to do.

He steps away from the bar, shaking his head and making tsk-ing sounds. "That was clumsy, honestly, Elijah" he says, letting the silky tone of his own voice (far superior to Mojo's in every way) carry amused disbelief. "But I have to admit, he caught you out. I concede defeat," he drawls, and sketches a tiny bow in Elijah's direction.

Elijah blinks blankly for a moment, and Lando gives him what he hopes is a significant look. After a second, relief flickers to life in Elijah's blue eyes.

"You win," Lando continues once he's certain Elijah understands he's to play along. "Mojo is far less stupid than appearances would indicate."

"I don't know what the hell yer jawin' about," Mojo growls, a tone that he's far better at than the silky one he'd tried to employ a moment ago, "but you'd best just butt out of this, Frog."

"Ah, but I've been involved in this since before _you_ were, mon ami," Lando smirks, and makes an elegant gesture toward Elijah. "It was a bet, you see. A slight wager. I asserted that you had the intellect of a scabrous cur that eats from piles of refuse and defecates in its own bedding, whilst Elijah," he nods in Elijah's direction and smirks, "insisted that you were a man of intelligence and cunning. I admit, it was a wager I never expected to lose, but he's proved me wrong, and as a man of honor, I shall have to make good on it." He tugs his wallet out of his jacket and rifles conspicuously in it. "Your money, of course, will be returned to you, correct, Elijah?"

"Absolutely," Elijah agrees. " _Certainement,_ " he says, trying out one of Julien's words he's heard frequently of late, and if his tongue trips just a bit over the strange, sibilant flow of it, it's worth it just to see the quick flash of (pleased?) surprise cross Julien's face. Elijah isn't sure what Julien is playing at-- or, rather, he sees what. He just doesn't understand the _why_ , though he guesses he can puzzle that out later. For now he's just grateful that the big man is turning his attention to Julien, and Elijah makes a show of pushing the pot across the table-- _scabrous cur_ , he thinks-- at the same time he pushes his chair back from the table, buying himself a few more precious inches of space.

"And what makes you think I'll let that go?" the cur says, and now his voice is indeed the snarl of a low-born dog. His eyes flick back to Elijah, raking over his skin with something a little like want steeped in bitter contempt. "You don't get to insult me just so's you can protect this cheat; what the hell do you care about the little whore, anyhow? You fucking boys now, La Fleur?"

Elijah feels all the blood rush out of his face and then rush back, and he curses his milky skin, he's burning and he knows it, and he hates that Julien sees, hates that Julien might think it's because Elijah finds the thought repulsive, hates that Julien might think it's because Elijah wants exactly that. He isn't sure which is worse, but it doesn't matter, because Julien has gone so still that he doesn't seem to be looking at Elijah at all, the ghost of a smile still frozen on his face like winter's rime along the sharp pink cactus blossoms.

"Your manners, monsieur, are those of a pig, much like your odeur. I strongly suggest you apologize to young Monsieur Wood,"-- but before the man says anything, Elijah sees a flicker of movement from across the table, and the area immediately surrounding him seems to _explode_ into motion. As quickly as a rattlesnake uncoiling, Julien's arm shoots out; Elijah doesn't even see what's in his hand until his eyes focus on Dave, and the knife hilt jutting from the meaty part of his right arm. Dave's hand lingers on the butt of his gun for a moment, as though he doesn't realize what's happened, and then slowly, almost languidly, the hand falls to his side. Elijah jumps up and back instinctively, knocking over his chair, but not before Julien has another knife pressed underneath the big man's chin, and the tableau freezes except for the vivid welling of blood around Dave's fingers as he clutches at his wounded arm.

"I trust that I have made myself clear, oui?"

Mojo swallows hard and repeatedly; Lando can see the bastard's Adam's apple bobbing up and down alongside the tip of his blade. He can hear Elijah panting hoarsely from behind him, but he doesn't look. From where he's standing, practically on top of Mojo (having gone _over_ the table rather than around it, a matter of necessity, and he can feel whiskey from Mojo's glass dampening one leg of his trousers, bugger it), he can see both of his opponents, and he can't afford to look at Elijah.

"Oui?" he repeats, and tilts the tip of the knife very slightly, and a bright bead of blood wells up at the tip. Mojo's Adam's apple bobs convulsively.

"Let's," Dave gulps harshly, his breathing fast and thready (and his face very pale), "let's get out of here, Mojo."

"You will apologize to Elijah," Lando snarls into Mojo's face, and tightens his grip on the knife hilt, letting Mojo feel the movement through the tip just pricking his neck. "Do we have an understanding?"

"Yeah," Mojo barks, nodding, and then wincing as the flesh of his throat shifts beneath the edge of Lando's knife. "Yeah, Yes, I will," he agrees, and Lando eases the knife back and away from the man's throat.

He straightens, shifting his shoulders to correct the hang of his coat, and takes a step back from Mojo, keeping his gaze sharp and expectant. "Elijah," he says, and Elijah doesn't disappoint him, steps forward until he's standing next to Lando, and if he's still a trifle pale, at least his back is straight and his face is composed.

"'M sorehcall ye'hoor," is what it sounds like when Mojo speaks, and Lando narrows his eyes at the man's flushed, beefy face.

"Excusez-moi, espèce de tas d'excrément malodorant," Lando says evenly, his tone the epitome of polite, the insult delivered through sneering lips. "I am afraid I cannot understand you. Speak up."

"I'm sorry I called you a cheating whore, boy," Mojo grits out through clenched teeth, his eyes murderous, but his pulse still jumping madly in his throat. He glares at Lando, but doesn't look at Elijah at all, even as he apologizes; perhaps he isn't completely stupid then, Lando muses.

"I accept," Elijah says simply, endeavoring to be graceful, Lando suspects, though it actually comes across as more nervous than anything else. Nevertheless, he retains his poise, so there's hope for him, if Lando could just break him of the habit of cheating. The boy's poker face is no shakier than Lando's had been when Bills had picked him up off the side of the road.

And Elijah isn't stupid. He could be taught.

"C'est quand même extraordinaire!" Lando declares, letting a wide smile curve his lips. He claps Elijah on the back, and then turns toward Mojo's lackey. "I beg your pardon," he says, and slips his hand around the hilt of the knife protruding from the bloke's arm (ignoring the man's horrified expression and accompanying flinch) and pulls it free. There's single, quick gout of blood, and Lando presses his handkerchief to the wound a moment later. "The knife is clean," he says, "but you will still wish to cleanse the wound, monsieur. That done, it should heal nicely." Dave nods dumbly, and clutches the handkerchief to his arm, staring at Lando like he expects the knife to suddenly puncture another of his limbs at any moment.

Lando resists the urge to shake his head and roll his eyes, and steps away instead, cleaning the blade on another handkerchief (a gentleman always carries a spare, after all) meticulously.

"It would be best, I think," he says, when the two brainless roughnecks just stand there, frozen, while Lando cleans his blade, "if the pair of you do not come back. Ever."

And Lawrence is there, of course, materializing out of the shadows, as is his wont, to escort them to the door, his bulk looming threateningly over them (something Mojo, at least, is likely unused to) as he squires them outside.

Lando watches for a moment, and then turns to Elijah, letting the smile fall off of his face.

"You and I, mon jeune ami, are going to have words."

Elijah swallows, becomes aware, for the first time in what seems a small eternity, of breathing out. Julien is standing close enough to him that Elijah can smell the damp heat of whiskey on cotton, and underneath that something darker, musky sweet sweat, and it's distracting, distracting in the usual way but also, perhaps, a little more than that, not that Elijah's going to examine that thought too closely right now; but Julien's eyes carry even less of a smile than his lips, so Elijah drops his.

"I figured we might." Elijah realizes he's still in shock. Julien had moved so fast he couldn't quite say when exactly the motion had begun; there had just been the hint of threat and then the air had flashed silver-red. The things Elijah's heard whispered about Julien now seem entirely true; that he isn't the dandy he appears. Or not _only_ that, no. Elijah can see that Julien is clearly a very dangerous man to cross. He feels sure that, had Julien wanted it, the knife would have been buried in Dave's neck instead of his arm. Easy as his mother's knife sinking into gooseberry pie.

But for all that he's not afraid of Julien, even if he should be. Elijah raises his eyes again and meets Julien's with not a little flash of defiance.

"I suppose you're going to tell me I shouldn't cheat."

Lando just looks at Elijah for several seconds, until the flash of temper dissipates and he just looks uncomfortable and a bit sulky. " _I_ don't cheat," Lando qualifies carefully. "It is neither dependable nor admirable as a method of winning, and it's beneath a poker player possessing either merit or skill."

Elijah's cheeks burn dully, but he doesn't drop his gaze.

Lando admires his spirit, if nothing else.

"Frankly, Elijah, I'm not particularly interested in your cheating one way or another." Which isn't precisely true, be he understands well enough that forbidding a child to do something is the surest way to make such a thing irresistible. "But, mon dieu, child, if you're going to cheat, at least cheat _well_. You are clumsy and inadequate, your technique is merde and your face shows everything you think at any given moment. At this rate, you'll be dead before you're twenty, and you are much mistaken if you believe I intend to make finessing you out of similar situations commonplace, or are harboring the slightest hope that I will do such a thing even _once_ more."

Elijah says nothing, his whole face burning now and his eyes sparking with indignant pride, practically glowing (and such a color they are, very much Deborah's eyes) with humiliation. He is rigid, his fists clenched into knots, but he just nods once, accepting the rebuke, demonstrating once again an attempt at grace that falls short of the mark, but is an _attempt_ , nonetheless.

Lando sighs and lets his expression soften. "Elijah," he says, and shakes his head. "Your mother would be ashamed. You are not a stupid young man, and this is what you aspire to? Trash poker with the unwashed masses? Really, I cannot fathom what you are thinking. You are worth so much _more_ than this." Lando doesn't mention Sinclair, though the temptation to do so is nearly always present when he talks to Elijah.

As with Deborah, Lando doesn't have the right to question the methods by which Elijah obtains the things he needs.

The feelings collide inside Elijah even faster than Julien's knife had struck bone. Shame, bright burning shame at the reminder that his mother would hardly have approved of his afternoon's activities. A different kind of shame, thinner and darker, at having his shortcomings so ruthlessly laid open by Julien. Anger at the ease with which Julien invokes his mother's ghost to try and manipulate him, and more anger, turned like thumbscrews on himself, that it works.

But finally a sweet flush of pleasure commingles and rises to the surface, a lighter element. Julien thinks he is worth. _Something_. Something more than this dusty town can afford him in his prison of blue and bone. For a moment he sees himself reflected in Julien's eyes, and thinks of leaving, of starting again under some other piece of sky, where his worth wouldn't be quite so colored by a dead whore's shadow.

Even as he thinks it the shame comes flooding back; not for what he is, but for his own traitorous thoughts. Now, more than ever, Elijah understands that survival is a precarious thing, and his mother did what she must. As he does. As he will.

"And what should I aspire to, then?" Elijah asks, and he means for it to come out light and bantering, but instead the edges are bitter-sharp.

Elijah looks away for the first time when the edged words leave his lips, and the dull burn in his cheeks fades to their customary paleness. Lando feels a pang at the empty bitterness of those words, but he can hardly fault the boy. It's a fair question, after all, and while Lando himself hadn't been quite this bitter this young, hadn't been quite this disillusioned with life, he hadn't been so much older that he doesn't remember what it feels like.

He still knows what it feels like, on his bad days.

Lando -- or rather Ruben, he supposes -- knew a man once, a half-Sioux Indian that rode with a band that Lando had done some cattle rustling with in New Mexico. His name was Bloody Jim. Or that's what he called himself, anyhow. Lando doubts that anyone's mother actually names them "Bloody Jim." He reminded Lando a bit of Billy, a man of long, closed silences interspersed with bits of unlikely and unexpected wisdom. Two days out of San Rafael they were all worn thin, half drunk on a combination of exhaustion and corn whiskey, and Lando had asked Bloody Jim why he was there.

It was a question you didn't ask, and Lando knew it when he did it, but he was still young, then, and too curious for his own good. He had killed his first man just under a year previous, and he still dreamed badly about it, still sometimes looked at the moon and felt the weight of it, seemed to see it tremble like an egg prepared to roll out of the nest of the heavens. He asked even though he knew better, and Lando still thinks about Bloody Jim's answer.

 _"Every man seeks completion or destruction, Ace,"_ he said, calling Lando, as many of them had, by an abbreviated form of Ruben's last name. _"It's the way of people to always be looking for one or the other."_

Of course, Lando had asked. He's never been able _not_ to ask.

Bloody Jim hadn't answered directly. He'd just looked at Lando, his face grave and cold, as though untouched by the warm, orange light spilling from the campfire, as though lit only by the cool, white light of the moon and the stars in the vast sky above them. _"We are all, here, seeking the same thing,"_ Bloody Jim murmured, his hand sweeping a wide curve to indicate the others gathered around the fire, a loose circle of guns and knives attached to the belts of young men that should, by rights, be too young to have ever touched such things.

And Lando nodded and remained silent, because he knew then, even as he knows now, that he was on the road to hell, and hell was only another word for destruction.

"Julien?" Elijah asks, and Lando actually starts, blinking away heavy cobwebs of memory from his mind, things he never allows himself to consider in the light of day.

Lando manages a smile and pushes the bulk of the shadows away.  
Elijah's brow is slightly drawn with concern, and his eyes are still bright, for all the bitterness in his voice. It's not too late.

"Completion," Lando says, and then repeats it in French, remembering the careful roll of Elijah's voice mimicking Julien's earlier. "Intégrité, Elijah. Do not set your feet on the road to hell so soon. Your past does not determine your future. Not always."

He knows he's being cryptic, but there's nothing for it. Some things can't be explained. But he can see from Elijah's expression that he is at least thinking about it.

And that's something.


End file.
